In The Land Of [Tom] Cotton, Old Times There Damned Surely ARE Forgotten: Cotton Introduces Corruption-Of-Blood Bill Punishing Families Of Iran Sanctions Violators

The next time a GOPer invokes the Constitution, smack him upside the head. Swing with everything you've got, because it will take a goodly clout to get through his thick skull.

Here's Zach Carter at HuffPo:

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Wednesday offered legislative language that would "automatically" punish family members of people who violate U.S. sanctions against Iran, levying sentences of up to 20 years in prison.

The provision was introduced as an amendment to the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013, which lays out strong penalties for people who violate human rights, engage in censorship, or commit other abuses associated with the Iranian government.

Cotton also seeks to punish any family member of those people, "to include a spouse and any relative to the third degree," including, "parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids," Cotton said.

"There would be no investigation," Cotton said during Wednesday's markup hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "If the prime malefactor of the family is identified as on the list for sanctions, then everyone within their family would automatically come within the sanctions regime as well. It'd be very hard to demonstrate and investigate to conclusive proof."

...

<Sigh! /> If Cotton assumes the act is treason and bases his bill on that assumption, someone needs to compel him to read Article III Section 3 of the Constitution, the second clause of which concludes "... but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted." IOW, even if it is treason, and even if the accused is convicted of it, the convict's punishment doesn't apply to his relatives or descendants.

Hey, Tom, you should be embarrassed. I know you won't be, dumb-fucking GOPers never are, but you damned well ought to be.

Texas Supreme Court Boots Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO)

The ordinance (.pdf) would have prohibited "any type of discrimination based on sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity, or pregnancy," which are defined as "protected characteristics in city employment, city services, city contracting practices, housing, public accommodations, and private employment": in short, most basic human rights for city employees and contractors, city residents, residents in city public housing, public accommodations (i.e., businesses already obligated to be available to any member of the public who requires their goods and services) and employees of private companies over which the city has jurisdiction. (IANAL; please do not rely on this list, which is for explanatory purposes only, in any legal matters!)

The most frequent objection among opponents comes from people who dislike the ordinance's explicit protection of the rights of LGBTQ people. Heaven forfend that gay people should receive the least shred of human rights from their government, but Dog help them if they fail to pay their taxes. [/sarcasm]

Only in Texas, I hear you murmur (or shout), but I'll bet you a dollar that Texas is only the first among a number of states to void such city ordinances.

Houston has until Aug. 24 to repeal the ordinance or else place it on the November ballot for citizen approval. Again I hear you muttering, that approval will never happen, but I'm not so sure of that; Houston is, or at least has been, the most or second most politically Democratic (cap-D) city in Texas for many years, and it is my perception that all this anti-rights bullcrap is coming from our very Republican state supreme court, not the population at large, certainly not Houston's population.

This invalidation is yet more proof that the Texas Supreme Court, an elected body, is a virtually wholly partisan Republican entity. And to think it used to be the 'publicans who whined about "agenda-based adjudication" ...

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AFTERTHOUGHT: I meant to say that it is a really bad sign when any government in a supposedly free and open society institutes laws which specifically remove people's rights rather than protecting them. (Right-wing readers: don't bother giving me that BS about "freedom of religion" ... no matter how many Bible-thumpers proclaim it, genuine "freedom of religion" is NOT equivalent to "freedom to force other people to behave in accordance with your religion." All our nation's founders turn in their graves every time someone asserts that.)

Justice Stevens Offers Six Constitutional Amendments

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, perhaps sensing the severe but reparable harms done to the Constitution by our current Supreme Court, forged in rulings by the nut-jobs appointed to the Court by Republican presidents (sorry; you can't legitimately blame "both parties" for this one), offers, in a book, Six Amendments that might help repair some of the damage. I can't imagine these amendments succeeding in the period of congressional insanity in which we live, but I agree the effort needs to be begun, in hopes that at least some of them can be accomplished by, say, our grandchildren.

NOTE: the link to the OCLC info for this book provided in the Kos article linked above apparently has the wrong ISBN; try searching your local library's online catalog for the title. Here is such a link for Houston Public Library's copies of Stevens's book. I just placed a hold on a copy, but the library appears to have many copies, and I was immediately placed at the head of a queue for one of them. (I was not so lucky with Thomas Piketty's book; I started at 74 and have finally, after many months, reached 8th in the queue.)

US Constitution, Article II, Section 3

[Of the President:]

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; ...

Bolds mine. Reproduced here for the benefit of the GOPer ratfucking bastards in the House of Representatives, who are thinking of blocking the State of the Union.

Look, muthafuckas, it doesn't matter if you reject it. It doesn't even matter if the President reads it in front of you; Washington himself sent a written document. It doesn't matter if the issues it addresses are of no interest to you; it's the President's baby entirely. It doesn't even have to be annually delivered; that's just tradition. It is a constitutional duty of the President to provide you with "Information of the State of the Union". If s/he does that, in a manner of his/her choosing, the presidential duty has been fulfilled, and you have no legitimate complaint against the President.

If you 'fuckas would spend a tenth the time on constructive legislation in cooperation with the President that you spend soiling yourselves and your constituents with the crap you spew in symbolic gestures, the nation might survive another century. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for you to do that... only to avoid smelling your crap.

Censure Of The President, And An Even More Unusual Punishment

Reps. Steve King (R-Nutjob) and Raul Labrador (R-Who?) want Congress to issue a formal censure of President Obama for his executive-order immigration reforms, as a way around impeaching him:

"I think we should censure the president of the United States," Labrador said on CBS, days after Obama announced his actions. "I think it’s unfortunate that he did this, I think we need to lay out clearly why this is unlawful."

But there's a problem. An impeachment is a criminal indictment by the House of Representatives, subject to conviction or acquittal by the Senate. Thus sayeth the Constitution (Article II, Section 4). By contrast, a censure of the president would be in every meaningful way a "bill of attainder," i.e., an act of Congress declaring someone guilty of a crime, without any sort of trial. The Constitution explicitly prohibits bills of attainder (Article I, Section 9). Impeachment and removal from office are effectively the only way to punish a bad president, and the Constitution lays out the details of how it is to be done. Without this restriction, no president would have time for anything except defending herself/himself against a rampaging opposition party's bills of attainder.

So Reps. King and Labrador are proposing a bill of attainder inflicting unspecified punishments on a duly elected President. "I think it’s unfortunate that [they] did this."

And as for me, I think a toilet plunger should be shoved into the pie‑hole of each of these representatives, to protect the nation from the crap spewing forth therefrom... but the Constitution makes no mention of, indeed never even implies, a citizen's right to plug the mouths of spewing legislators, however urgent the need. I guess we'll have to tolerate the spewing.

Lordy, those wingnuts surely know their Constitution, don't they? [/sarcasm]

And Here I Always Thought It Was A Quirk Of 18th-Century Capitalization

But noooo...

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government...

— US Constitution, Art. IV Sec. 4, edited for publication by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, 1976.

Damned if it doesn't describe the current state of affairs perfectly. [/sigh]

CIA's Likely Unconstitutional Removal Of Senate Intelligence Committee Evidence Documents From Senate Staffers' Computers, Revealed In March, Goes Unanswered In July

Peter Van Buren at FDL has the story. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein puts it this way (in a WaPo transcript quoted by Van Buren):

I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate Clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities.

[CIA actions] may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.

So... the Senate Intelligence Committee, as part of its balance-of-powers oversight role, investigates likely CIA violations of law; the CIA hacks the Committee's computers and deletes the relevant documents to interfere with that oversight, the Obama administration declines to intervene (see the article), and... nothing. That's right, nothing. Van Buren:

A classified 6,300-page Senate report on torture was prepared 19 months ago, before the details of the CIA spying became public. Calls were made, in March 2014, to declassify parts and release them to the public. Now, in July, we are still waiting.

Feinstein has had nothing further to say since March. You all know what that means: we're venturing still further into the post-Constitutional era. Enjoy your stay!

(H/T Enfant de la Haute Mer in comments. Sorry for the delay in crediting; I read the article independently just this morning and wrote this post after that. Enfant was on top of this issue long before I was!)

How The Global War On Terrorism Has Supplanted The American Bill Of Rights

Via l'Enfant de la Haute Mer in comments here, we have two versions of an excellent article by Peter van Buren, "RIP, The Bill of Rights" (at TomDispatch) and "How the ‘War on Terror’ Became a War on the Constitution" (at The Nation). Van Buren's thesis is that America has lived through two eras and into a third era of governance:

• a monarchy when America was England's colony, 
• a constitutional era after the American Revolution and for approximately two centuries, and 
• a post-constitutional era beginning (as I perceive it) not later than the presidency of Ronald Reagan and coming to fruition in the presidencies of Dick Cheney, er, I mean, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. 

We may call the last era the era of the imperial presidency, or the era of the unitary executive. The first and third eras bear a striking and painful resemblance to each other: unitary rule is always arbitrary rule, no matter what you call the chief executive. The difference is how he (in America it's always been a "he"; see many European examples of a "she" as chief executive) is chosen: a kingship is an hereditary position with the initial king allegedly chosen by God; a presidency is not hereditary but rather, um, er, not really elected by the people either, unless you consider monetary units as ballot-weighting units. Once an American president or a constitutional monarch takes office, the differences are few.

Van Buren has done such a fine job of exploring the particulars of America's government and its relationship (if any) to democracy that I hardly need repeat his work... you may productively give both his versions a good read.

Federal Judge Rules Nothing Can Possibly Challenge PATRIOT Act Section 215 — UPDATED 2x

Kevin Gosztola of FDL:

Judge Defends Government Secrecy & Dismisses ACLU Lawsuit Challenging NSA Surveillance Program

... Friday December 27, 2013

A federal judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection of Americans’ phone records is “lawful” and not unconstitutional.

The ruling comes just over a week after another federal judge ruled in a similar lawsuit that the surveillance program violates Americans’ privacy rights and James Madison, one of America’s founding fathers, would be “aghast” if he was alive to see this program.

Judge William H. Pauley, appointed by President Bill Clinton, did find that the ACLU had standing. The ACLU had not had been granted standing in its case against dragnet warrantless NSA surveillance before the Supreme Court and the lawsuit was dismissed. However, Pauley found that Congress had precluded challenges to the provision of the PATRIOT Act known as section 215, which the government has claimed grants the power to indiscriminately collect Americans’ phone records from telecommunications companies. He also did not find the constitutional claims argued by the ACLU had any merit.

“Allowing any challenge to a section 215 order by anyone other than a recipient would undermine the government’s vital interest in keeping the details of its metadata collection program secret,” he wrote in his decision. “It would also—because of the scope of the program—allow virtually any telephone subscriber to challenge a section 215 order.” Congress “intended to preclude statutory causes of action.”

...

[Bolds mine. - SB]

So a federal judge, a Bill Clinton appointee, has ruled that God can make a stone so heavy S/He cannot lift it Congress can pass a law whose constitutionality cannot be challenged by other branches of government through ordinary judicial processes.

This cannot end well. This cannot end with the survival, intact, of the Constitution of the United States of America.

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UPDATE: patrick devlin at FDL offers thoughts worthy of our attention, notwithstanding a few punctuation and syntax problems:

... a federal judge (appointed by Democratic president Bill Clinton), has established as federal case law that citizens cannot have privacy in their associations and communications under American law and have no right to challenge what the US government has acknowledged is complete and continuous spying within the US court system.

Furthermore, the judge declared that the personal communications of Americans and the citizens of other countries, even as these communications are the physical expressions that reveal the personal cogitative energies carried out by individual humans – the thoughts that are our own and that we understand to be ‘self-expressions’, are in fact not “owned” by us (the expressing individuals) but, are rather the personal possessions of the data service and communications businesses upon whose equipment we hire to deliver our personal ideas and expressions through. As in: the above 2 sentences are the personal possession of the dizzying array of owners, renters, users, firewall builders, server operators and data transmitting and information storing entities who may desire to lay claim to the above two comma laden attempts at cogitation&communication (& this one, too).

...

As inheritors of the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution, we can rest easy because all of this personal rights subversion and annihilation is being carried out as a “counter punch” [ed. note: the judge's words, not devlin's] by our protecting homeland security operatives against the “al-Qaeda’s terror network,” ...

Further, and most importantly as it coagulates our proctors’ in big business, our elected leaders and now the court system, vision of a new American philosophy of freedom, we must understand and accept the notion that;

Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law…the success of one helps protect the other. Like the 9/11 Commission observed: The choice between liberty and security is a false one, as nothing is more apt to imperil civil liberties than the success of a terrorist attack on American soil.

One may ask if Pauley’s ruling is not itself the creation of case law that pours poison on the soil of American democracy and its citizens’ rights in an effort to render that fertile ground permanently barren; ...

...

Yes, it's a "counter punch," all right...

... though a head might be a better emblem than a fist.

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UPDATE: emptywheel is also worth reading on the subject.

US District Court Judge Rules NSA Meta‑Data Collection Unconstitutional

From Myrddin at AMERICAblog:

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon has found that an NSA program collecting telephone ‘meta-data’ is unconstitutional.

Although the ruling is stayed pending inevitable appeal, the impact on the debate on the US dirty war of drone strikes, imprisonment without trial and mass surveillance is likely to be profound.

For years, we have been assured that the NSA surveillance programs are ‘unquestionably legal’. Which of course was technically true in the sense that nobody was able to challenge the programs in court because the NSA denied they existed.

Judge Leon’s ruling strips away the cloak of legality from the NSA operations, for a time at least. It will be many months before an appeals court hears the case, and many more months before there is a ruling. The Senate will have to hold hearings on replacement directors of the NSA and national intelligence first.

...

Morale at the NSA has collapsed. Job applications are down by a third, and retention has suffered too. ...

...

It couldn't happen to a nicer more appropriate agency.

It's winter, and you know about a snowball's chance in hell? IMHO, this ruling has about the same chance in SCOTUS...

Free 'States', Slave Patrols And The Second Amendment

Thom Hartmann, at Truthout, writes "The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery," and the evidence he presents appears to validate that statement. The amendment's use of "free State" instead of "free Country" (our Founders knew the difference) was inserted to obtain the vote of Virginia, a slave state, and to preserve Virginia's slave patrol, the militia of which the amendment speaks. Hartmann reminds us in that context that "[f]ounders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that... and we all should be too." Read the rest of his documentation: it appears very likely to me that "free State[s]" rather than a "free Country" are what the 2^nd Amendment is really about, and that that "well-regulated Militia" referred to what was otherwise known as a "slave patrol." In those terms, it is not as noble an aim as it might seem under another interpretation.

If the 2^nd Amendment was inserted, not as a device to defend the nation, but rather as a means to uphold slavery in the slave states, then that amendment should have been abolished, or at least reinterpreted, when the 13^th and 14^th Amendments were ratified. Somehow that never happened, but the clear intent of those two amendments is the abolition of slavery in America... so it must happen. It is time to remove the ambiguity and interpret the 2^nd Amendment properly as an amendment supporting slavery... an amendment invalidated by the 13^th and 14^th Amendments.

This is going to put a few people's drawers in a knot...

(H/T Michael Moore. Article linked above is offsite, not on MichaelMoore.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: I find it interesting that so many of the commenters on the Hartmann thread seem unwilling to talk about guns, gun rights and slavery at all. Many of them are seeking a particular outcome, as have many Americans in general for over a century and a half. Antonin Scalia notwithstanding, we have a question of constitutional intent here, not a matter to be resolved by parsing constitutional text (at least not in today's English), and the question, to my thinking, must be resolved based on whether the 2^nd Amendment is compatible with the institution of slavery, which was abolished in the 13^th and 14^th Amendments. I'm not saying it's simple, but I am saying it is an issue of gun rights in the context of the abolition of slavery... and that if Hartmann is right, the 2^nd Amendment is in peril and has been so since ratification of the 13^th and 14^th Amendments. YMMV.

How Does Obama Really Feel About His Drone 'Kill List'? And Will It Pass To The Next President?

Kevin Gosztola of FDL's The Dissenter reveals that "an unnamed official with the Obama administration" told Scott Shane of the New York Times that in seeking to answer that question, the Obama administration contemplated the very real possibility that the levers of power might pass from Obama's to Rmoney's hands, and sought to codify and restrict the targeted assassination powers. From Shane's article:

...

... With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

...

Gosztola's concerns are much like my own:

...

The revelation is remarkable in that it shows GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney—not the fact that the power to extrajudicially kill people suspected of committing or having ties to terrorism was being claimed—was why the administration began to have increased concerns over drone warfare.

...

Clearly there needs to be a formal policy in place regarding targeted assassinations using drones: they are sloppy weapons liable to kill far more people than the intended target, and in those few cases where the targeted person has been an American citizen, that citizen had no opportunity for a trial, a proof of his/her guilt before a court of law, and a formal sentence by such a court. In other words, if drone use were not bad enough on the grounds that America is murdering babies, it is still worse because it is used unapologetically to violate the Fourth Amendment. All of this needs to be thought out, debated and decided by a team of advisors not given to thinking in lock-step with the president.

That said, drone warfare is liable to continue and even increase into the indefinite future, including, yes, into a Republican presidency, if indeed that would be any worse. (I always said Obama is the lesser evil, not that he is not capable of evil.) If this haphazard, cowboy-shoot-first attitude continues, it will not be long before America has no friends among the nations and leaders of the world... and who can blame them. We need three things: real rules in place and implemented in the field, clear accountability for every drone strike, and... most of all... transparency. These acts are being committed in my name, and in yours if you're an American citizen: you deserve to know as specifically as possible who is being killed and why, what their nationality is, if they are noncombatants, whether their due process rights were preserved, and who dies as "collateral damage" from this most indiscriminate of weapons.

And Mr. Obama... well, he needs to pull out the book from which he used to teach Review of Constitutional Law (or whatever it's called), and spend some time with his nose in it. Apparently he's forgotten some things. Apparently, many of the rest of us have forgotten those same things. It's time for a serious review of the rightful limits on presidential power.

Where We Stand: Charters, The Commons, Rights And Liberties, Discussed At Length By Noam Chomsky

Here. Reserve a good half hour, maybe more, to read this broadly conceived and very substantial article. H/T Michael Moore for hosting this excellent presentation.