Indefinite Detention REMOVED from NDAA by Senate Amendment Vote! Right to Trial By Jury Restored Says Sen. Rand Paul

The NDAA that was passed last year in 2011 came under fire because the bill would allow the President to use the military to detain Americans on American soil without a trial. This created a massive backlash because detaining Americans on American soil with no trial is just outrageous! Every US citizen should be given due process and a trial.

The really good news is that the Senate has voted to remove from the 2012 NDAA the power of the President to detain, without a trial, any US Citizen!

See comments at the end of this article from Senator Rand Paul regarding the amendment that he co-sponsored to protect US Citizens from Indefinite Detention!

The NDAA from 2011 also had some other troubling changes, including removal of the ban on Beastiality. Yep, that is right, it is no longer against the UCMJ to have sex with animals in the military.

The article I wrote last year about the 2011 NDAA removing the ban on sex with animals (Beastiality) is actually the most highly visited article that I have ever written. It got over 50,000 hits on TexasGOPVote.com in what seemed like only overnight and still gets lots of traffic every day. It is also the article with the most hits on my personal blog site TexasConservativeRepublicanNews.com

Some of the traffic to that article came from people outraged at the power of Obama to indefinitely detain US citizens on US soil without a trial, but I think the main reason that article got so many hits (based on google analytics) was because of “sex” and “animals” being in the same headline together. Pretty sickening to know that those words together get so much traffic in search engines.

The reason they removed the ban on sex with animals is actually pretty simple. Soldiers get to be used as pawns to push a political agenda. Soldiers are the perfect people to do a social experiment on because, well, they can't really complain. If the government wants to defy the defense of marriage act and allow military chapels to be used for gay marriages, then they will do it. If they want to remove a ban on beastiality because a ban on sodomy and sex with animals might be seen as discriminatory to gay soldiers, then bye bye beastiality ban. If the military allows a Muslim terrorist to wear a US uniform because it would be racist and politically incorrect to kick a Muslim out of the army, then the terrorist Major Nidal Hasan stays in the Army and  kills over a dozen soldiers at Fort Hood (and Obama says it was only workplace violence). Oh, and if Obama wants to fund Planned Parenthood and abortions, then hey, just send a letter to all soldiers telling them that they are fighting but won't get paid because President Obama would rather have a government shutdown and not pay the troops than not fund Planned Parenthood.

Anyway, enough of that rant about soldiers being used as social experiments instead of just getting to train and focus on being the best, most well oiled fighting machine on the planet. Now back to the NDAA. The new 2012 NDAA that was just passed still has the ban on beastiality removed, but there was at least one great victory for conservatives because the 2012 NDAA removed the power of the President to detain any US citizen indefinitely without a trial.

The Following Statement is from Senator Rand Paul's Office Regarding this Victory for Americans:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This evening, the U.S. Senate voted on Amendment No. 3018 to the National Defense Authorization Act sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and co-sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul, which protects the rights prescribed to Americans in the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution with regard to indefinite detention and the right to a trial by jury.

The amendment passed, 67-29.

Moments before the vote, Sen. Paul took to the Senate floor to again voice his support for the amendment and inspire his colleagues to do the same. Below is video and transcript of his floor speech.

TRANSCRIPT:

I want to congratulate my colleagues on — even though they appear to sometimes have disdain to the trial by jury, to now appear to be supporting the right to trial by jury. And I congratulate them on their conversion. I think they’re still a little bit confused on Hamdi.

Hamdi had to do with the citizen fighting overseas and nothing to do with the citizen here. I have great confidence that the Supreme Court, given a ruling on the right to trial by jury, will affirm the right to trial by jury whether they were appointed by Ronald Reagan or President Obama. So we’ll have that fight on another day. I will say, though, that our oath of office says that we will defend the Constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic.

I met with cadets this week and they asked me about, ‘what is the freedom we fight for?’ The freedom we fight for is the Bill of Rights, it is the Constitution. If we have careless disregard for the Constitution, what are we fighting for?

I will tell you since I know this record of this debate will be widely read, that I want to make former objection to the crazy bastards standard. I don’t really think that if we’re going to have a crazy bastard standard that we shouldn’t have a right to trial by jury, because if we’re going to lock up all the crazy bastards, for goodness sakes – would you not want if you’re a crazy bastard to have a right to trial by jury?

I think this is a very serious debate and should not be made frivolous. This is an ancient right that we have defended for 800 years, for goodness sakes. To say that habeas is due process is absurd. It’s the beginning of due process. If you don’t have a right to trial by jury, you do not have due process. You do not have a Constitution. What are you fighting against and for if you throw the Constitution out? If you throw the Sixth Amendment out? It’s in the body of our Constitution. It’s in the Bill of Rights. It’s in every constitution in the United States. For goodness sakes, the trial by jury has been a long-standing and ancient and noble right. For goodness sakes, let’s not scrap it now.

I will accept victory today. I hope we will win victory and reaffirm the right to trial by jury, but let’s don’t play any games with any aspect and really believe that any Supreme Court in the United States, whether appointed by a Republican or a Democrat, is going to say that an American citizen does not have a right to trial by jury.

Issues: 

Comments

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Even if one is to concede that the Feinstein-Lee Amendment removes Congressional authorization for "indefinite detention," (the Supreme Court has already ruled that the 2001 AUMF does authorize it), it doesn't remotely make us any safer.

Everything that was codified into law via Sections 1021 and 1022 of the 2012 NDAA were authorities already claimed and exercised by both the Bush and Obama Administrations PRIOR to the passage of the 2012 NDAA.

In the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case, the Bush Justice Dept. argued that the President didn't need Congressional detention authority, that he had such as "plenary authority" under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which designates him as Commander-in-Chief.

The Supreme Court did NOT decide on that argument, instead agreeing with the DOJ's other argument that Congress "had" authorized said detentions, to include U.S. citizens. That Congress may end up removing that authorization via the Feinstein-Lee Amendment is not the same thing as their actually "prohibiting" the President from applying the "law of war" on U.S. soil.

All Congress will have done is further abdicate its Constitutional duty to defend the Rights of the People via defending the Constitution. This amendment doesn't do that at all. At best, it sets up another court battle at some point in the future when this or the next President decides the "law of war" is supreme Law of the Land instead of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Additionally, the Supreme Court did not rule on whether or not the Non-Detention Act (18 USC 4001) even applied to military prisons/detentions. That it does NOT, is another argument the Bush DOJ raised in the Hamdi case.

The GAO study that Senator Feinstein commissioned regarding the transfer of Gitmo detainees to the U.S. prison system revealed another alarming consideration, to wit; that the DOJ, U.S. Marshalls, and Bureau of Prisons didn't have statutory authority to take custody of persons detained by the military pursuant to the AUMF.

So, if you're arrested, captured, or otherwise detained in the U.S. pursuant to the 2001 AUMF, who does that leave with statutory authority to detain you? The military.

America is NOT the battlefield. Habeas has not been suspended, and the criminal (treasonous act -See Article III, Section 3) act of aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States is a crime that, barring the exceptions in the 5th Amendment related to persons serving in the land or naval forces, or the Militia, and to be compliant with the Geneva Conventions aka the "laws of war," ALL persons captured or arrested in the United States are entitled to the full array of Constitutional protections, not simply what the President or Congress want to "give" them.

It is not the federal government's job to keep us safe. It is their job to keep us free, to protect our God-given inalienable Rights. That is job one. The Feinstein-Lee Amendment ignores that duty by failing to prohibit the application of the "law of war" to anyone on U.S. soil, and to U.S. citizens abroad.

For a more detailed analysis with citations, read: "Due Process Guarantee Amendment to NDAA Continues 'Treason to the Constitution" at: http://theintolerableacts.org/docs/REJOINORDIE-3702a.pdf

Jeff Lewis
National Director, Patriot Coalition
The Intolerable Acts ACTION CENTER
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