Actively looking
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus — the constitutional right to challenge in court the legality of a person’s detention by the government — for migrants.
Miller’s comment came in response to a White House reporter who asked about President Donald Trump entertaining the idea of suspending the writ to deal with the problem of illegal immigration into the United States.
Asked when that might happen, Miller responded: “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion.”
“So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said.
A number of pending civil cases challenging the Trump administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States are based on habeas claims.
People challenge the Trump administration because the people have rights, so the Trump administration gets to work making sure the people stop having rights. Of course it does.
The writ has been suspended only four times since the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And in all but one of those instances, Congress first authorized the suspension.
The idea of habeas corpus originated in English common law. “No man shall be arrested or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land,” a provision in the Magna Carta, signed by King John in the early 13th Century, says.
The U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, section 9, says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Miller’s use of the word “invasion” reflects the Trump administration’s argument that the U.S. faces an “invasion” of undocumented migrants.
And the Trump administration’s eagerness to lock up and punish migrants.
“Invasion”? What invasion?
Besides, they are not belligerents. There’s no war. There’s no fighting. Shall we interpret the terms of the Constitution, oh, I don’t know, literally? Ya know, using the plain meaning, like the canons of construction require? How about “original intent,” as the strict constructionists insist must be done?
Well of course they’re pretending that immigration=invasion.
Well, we didn’t suspend habeas corpus in the 1960s, during that British invasion. This one is about as big a threat as that one…which is to say, not.
Stephen Miller, who is quite the most contemptible and hysterically prejudiced person I have ever come across (despite being Jewish, had he born some years before Hitler gained power, I suspect he would be egging on Hitler to address the ‘Jewish problem’), is the architect of this, and is quite obviously parroting Carl Schmitt’s theory of the ’state of exception’, a theory which that nasty but highly intelligent (his book on Hamlet, as well as his political books are worth reading, if only to profoundly disagree with them) Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt proposed, and led to his supporting Hitler. Miller’s family, who originally came to the USA, from Belarus (then in the Russian Empire), to escape the pogroms, do not appear to be supportive of his views. Here is his uncle, on Miller’s mother’s side (the Glossers), speaking about Miller:
“My nephew [Stephen Miller] and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”
Dan Mangan misquotes and possibly misunderstands the Magna Carta. The correct wording, translated from Latin, is:
Mangan has erroneously replaced “freeman” with “man.” Freeman is a specific term of that era, meaning a man who was not a serf. The Magna Carta applied first to the nobility and clergy, second to freemen, and not at all to serfs.
So, stretching the argument, the Trump administration could argue that those whom it targets are today’s serfs.
https://www.reference.com/history-geography/freeman-middle-ages-7e1e5b44302776f6
Good point; thank you.