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Anti-Patriot Act Movement Expands
MFS! writes "Mount Shasta, California has become the latest city where the USA PATRIOT act is creating a controversy. This story at the Record-Searchlight describes petitioning by a local citizens' rights committee to order police to defy the PATRIOT act. To date, 3 states and 130 cities have passed legislation forbidding local authorities from cooperating with federal PATRIOT requests, not to mention the numerous businesses who are taking pains to hamper the Act's coverage."
the Native Americans have a treaty to grow hemp. It wasn't a law (although it should have been considered so)...
Sorry.
It is my understanding that the Supreme Court can't shoot it down unless there is a case presented to it that came to it through the appeals process. I don't believe they can dismiss any law as unconstitutional until it is challenged; I may be wrong though.
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The text of the Act is here, and there are explanations in regular English here and here.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
The 10th Amendment has been ignored by the Feds for at least the last 140 years. Hell, it goes back to the Whiskey Rebellion if you want to go that far back. Even with all of the other erosions of the Bill of Rights, the 10th has been the most decimated by all three branches of the Federal Government. The state is supposed to be stronger than the federal so that we could have a diversity in laws with which to experiment. This is not the case any more. With the way that the 4th Amendment has been positively raped over the years by no knock warrents, confiscation laws in which a person can have their house seized by the police in a drug investigation even if no drugs are found and all charges are dropped I find it as no suprise that someone finally got around to nullifying it in it's entirety. Dok
"You can't screw the system, but you can give it a good fondling." -- Too lazy to look it up
It's not just that they can find out what you checked out -- it's that you won't ever be told. When that federal agent hands that librarian the order (which isn't signed by any judge, by the way, it's the agency's discretion whether the order should be executed) to hand over the library's records because there's a suspected terrorist cell or whatever excuse they come up with, she or he is placed under a gag order. They can't even tell their bosses, let alone you. the only recourse that librarian has is a lawyer, which she had damn well better avail herself of, because if the FBI does in turn use that information the patron can still sue her for releasing that information. But if they don't then the libary board, the head librarian, and the patrons who had their reading lists snooped through will never know.
Yeah, the 9th has been hit pretty damned hard, but when you look at the fact that almost every single federal law on the books undermines the 10th by overriding state sovereignty, the 10th looks a little like goatse man. Dok
"You can't screw the system, but you can give it a good fondling." -- Too lazy to look it up
actually, the 10th goes back further than the whiskey rebellion, all the way back to the original conception of the Constitution.
And you are forgetting that the 10th ammendment [which gives states the rights not expressely given to the feds] has a counterpart called the elastic clause. This clause gives the feds the power to do things that are prudent and right for them to do. Throughout the history of the US, there has been a constant struggle between loose and strict constructionists [loose const supporting the elastic clause and strict const supporting the 10th ammendment - obviously, as the parties vied for power, whichever one came into power at the federal level quickly became a loose const and the people at power at the state level quickly adopted strict const philosophy.] However, time and time again, the fed gov't has been able to flex far more muscle, and so, invariable, the elastic clause wins over the 10th ammendment. Which is why state nullification has itself become null and void.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Slavery was not what the war was fought over. It was only a tactical issue; Lincoln freed the slaves ONLY in confederate states; he specifically did NOT free them in Union states that allowed slavery. he did this, by his own admission, in the hopes that the slaves would revolt in the south.
The winner gets to write the history books.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Well if everybody believed that, it would almost be true, no? In matter of fact, you're 100% wrong. Congress basically has the right to tax us, regulate interstate commerce, regulate immigration, coin money, deliver mail, grant copyrights, raise an army, and a few other less interesting things. Outside of that, everything else belongs to the states. I'll just quote the relevant parts of the Constitution:
Article 1, Section 8: (powers delegated to Congress)
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;
To establish post offices and post roads;
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
To provide and maintain a navy;
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Understandably people are taking a closer look at the provisions under the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act now that the initial shock of 9/11 has worn off. The reaction to "do something" is not being governed by the climate of fear and the urgent feeling for a rapid response that followed the attacks, which also meant that many legislators didn't read or understand the entire bill. The fear of political opponents using a vote against a bill with the name "PATRIOT" didn't help.
Obviously many of those who are taking a sober second thought about the provisions don't like what they see, and this may be the start of a movement to let the sunset clause on the act take effect. It is set to expire at midnight (0h00) January 1, 2006.
Librarians are at the forefront of the movement and the American Library Association's USA PATRIOT Act campaign is one of many legislative and privacy issues that they address.
The July 4th weekend may be a good time to think about the USA PATRIOT act, argues the SJMC. Declan McCullagh offers his thoughts on the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 AKA PATRIOT Act II. You can also read EPIC's view of the DSEA 2003 and the original USA PATRIOT Act. They also have links to the text of the legislation and other info.
There are no constitutional rights to privacy.
The word "privacy" might not be explicity used in the Constitution, but one could make a strong case that the 4th and 10th amendments to the Constitution establish the principle that privacy (at least from the Government itself) is guaranteed by the Constitution.
And even if the Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to privacy, that doesn't mean there isn't one. There are rights that are even more fundamental than those enumerated by the Constitution... those are the "self-evident truths" and "inalienable" rights spoken of in the Declaration of Independence. It would be easy to argue that the right to privacy is a fundamental right that doesn't need to be spelled out in the Constitution.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Unfortunately all they seem to have learned from the Rosenthal case is to beware of media coverage. Which is, as it stands, a good thing, but don't think federal judges aren't going to help the feds dismantle prop 215. The one day sentence was a huge turnaround for the judge and only occurred after most of the jurors came forward and said they had changed their decisions. The rule permitting gag orders such as the one employed in the Rosenthal case has not been challenged, which means that not only aren't you permitted a medical necessity defense under prop 215, you are not allowed to mention the proposition at all or anything related to it (i.e. your lawyer can't say, "my client was growing pot under the order of the city of Oakland as an appointed deputy put in charge of enforcing proposition 215." So Rosenthal was portrayed as a common drug dealer rather than an officer of the city.) Until judges stop invoking that rule, it's likely that the federal government's open attack on California law will continue to succeed.
According to the US Supreme Court interpretation of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th amendments, there are constitutional rights to privacy. The Court found I think in Griswold v Connecticut that the right to privacy was constitutionally protected, and cited approvingly a definition of privacy from an 1890 law review article that called it "the right most valued by civilized man."
The real quotation is:
When the people fear the government you have tyranny
When the government fears the people you have liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...