Habeas Corpus

Barton: US Should Use Biblical Justice, Just As The Constitution Says

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Wednesday, 7/6/2011 9:41 am

Pseudo-historian David Barton visited Engage In Truth radio on Friday to share his right-wing view of American history and the Constitution. Without citing any evidence, David Barton said that the Due Process Clause and the Fourth and Eighth Amendments “all came out of the Bible.” Of course, Barton has a long track record of mentioning long lists of Bible verses which he believes inspired the drafters of the Constitution while never providing any proof to substantiate his claims.

Barton then goes on to cite various trials in the Bible or of biblical figures as evidence of how trials ought to be conducted and asserts that the trial system enshrined in the Constitution came directly out of the Bible: 

Barton: Now we have the Due Process Clause in the Constitution and the 4th and the 8th Amendments and that’s where you get an attorney and the right to confront your accuser and habeas corpus and all the things that are there, every one of those came out of the Bible. And it started in the Reformation with these guys pointing to the bad trials going in Europe and they said, look at the trials in the Bible, you got the trial of Naboth under Ahab and Jezebel, you got the trial of Jesus, the trial of Paul, the trial of Peter, none of the trials in Europe were being done biblically, we gotta get a system where we can do that. I mean the Declaration of Independence is about having good trials as it is about anything else and the trial clauses all came out of the Bible.

Barton, who launched his career by claiming that SAT scores dropped as a result of the end of unconstitutional school-officiated prayer, went on to say that the best way to improve the education system was to bring back school prayer. Again, without citing any evidence to back up his point, Barton blames the lack of prayer for a drop in test scores and then argues that test scores rose rapidly in schools that returned to school prayer even though he says it is banned:

Barton: If the premise is that taking prayer out in ’62, ’63 affected education, then the reverse premise is putting prayer back in will restore education. And that’s interesting because there’s a ton of stats that the schools that returned to prayer have academic scores exactly what they wore prior to 1962, 1963, that is fascinating that we can show that when you take prayer out our academic knowledge just went through the floor but it can also show that when you put it back in their knowledge recovered. So two those things are fairly significant and when you get a double correlation in social sciences that pretty strong stuff and we got that on the effect of prayer.

Clearly, the only thing David Barton “proved” in these interviews is that his lack of respect for facts and evidence shows why academics do not consider him a legitimate historian.

CPAC: Merit Selection for Judges is an Evil Leftist Plot

Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Friday, 2/11/2011 3:35 pm

A group of right-wing legal advocates warned CPAC participants – or more accurately, a tiny subset of CPAC participants – about “The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary.”

Panelists discussed the meaning of “judicial activism” and why the kind of right-wing judicial activism we’ve seen from the Supreme Court doesn’t qualify. (Overturning health care reform? Also not judicial activism.) But the main thrust of the panel was the supposedly dire threat posed by efforts at the state level to replace judicial elections with a merit selection process. 
 
The increasing tendency of judicial elections to become big-money affairs funded by individuals and groups who regularly appear before judges has increasingly raised concerns about judgeships – including state supreme court justices – being for sale to the highest bidder, such as corporate interests looking for courts that won’t hold corporations accountable for misconduct.
 
But today’s panelists – Liberty Institute’s Kelly Shackleford, American Justice Partnership’s Dan Pero, the Center for Individual Freedom’s Timothy Lee, and the American Civil Rights Union’s Ken Klukowski, warned against merit selection, a nonpartisan alternative that is employed in a number of states and under consideration in others. Pero called merit selection “a power grab by the liberal left,” citing People For the American Way, among others he said were liberals trying to use the courts to impose their vision on America.
 
Timothy Lee, perhaps mindful of the small crowd drawn to the panel, urged participants to explain to others why the courts were important, no matter what other issue they cared about. For example, he said, the Citizens United decision overturning Supreme Court precedent and substantially crippling the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law rested on the fact the Samuel Alito had replaced Sandra Day O’Connor on the high court.
 
Klukowski echoed Lee’s call, saying that the fight for “constitutional conservatism” can’t succeed without the right judges in place: “The U.S. Constitution is only as good as the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that interpret it.” He complained about the Supreme Court’s rulings that Guantanamo detainees have habeas corpus rights and about other federal courts recognizing marriage equality and ruling against the ban on gay servicemembers.
 
And while panel members celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, Klukowski said it’s not clear that there’s a majority in the Court for overturning other gun restrictions. He specifically complained that it is a felony for someone who went through a “messy divorce” and was under a restraining order to have a gun.
 
Klukowski said that he and Ken Blackwell have written a book called Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservativism can Save America and made an appeal for all stripes of conservatives – social, economic, and national security – to stop fighting each other and work together.

CPAC: Merit Selection for Judges is an Evil Leftist Plot

Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Friday, 2/11/2011 3:35 pm

A group of right-wing legal advocates warned CPAC participants – or more accurately, a tiny subset of CPAC participants – about “The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary.”

Panelists discussed the meaning of “judicial activism” and why the kind of right-wing judicial activism we’ve seen from the Supreme Court doesn’t qualify. (Overturning health care reform? Also not judicial activism.) But the main thrust of the panel was the supposedly dire threat posed by efforts at the state level to replace judicial elections with a merit selection process. 
 
The increasing tendency of judicial elections to become big-money affairs funded by individuals and groups who regularly appear before judges has increasingly raised concerns about judgeships – including state supreme court justices – being for sale to the highest bidder, such as corporate interests looking for courts that won’t hold corporations accountable for misconduct.
 
But today’s panelists – Liberty Institute’s Kelly Shackleford, American Justice Partnership’s Dan Pero, the Center for Individual Freedom’s Timothy Lee, and the American Civil Rights Union’s Ken Klukowski, warned against merit selection, a nonpartisan alternative that is employed in a number of states and under consideration in others. Pero called merit selection “a power grab by the liberal left,” citing People For the American Way, among others he said were liberals trying to use the courts to impose their vision on America.
 
Timothy Lee, perhaps mindful of the small crowd drawn to the panel, urged participants to explain to others why the courts were important, no matter what other issue they cared about. For example, he said, the Citizens United decision overturning Supreme Court precedent and substantially crippling the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law rested on the fact the Samuel Alito had replaced Sandra Day O’Connor on the high court.
 
Klukowski echoed Lee’s call, saying that the fight for “constitutional conservatism” can’t succeed without the right judges in place: “The U.S. Constitution is only as good as the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that interpret it.” He complained about the Supreme Court’s rulings that Guantanamo detainees have habeas corpus rights and about other federal courts recognizing marriage equality and ruling against the ban on gay servicemembers.
 
And while panel members celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, Klukowski said it’s not clear that there’s a majority in the Court for overturning other gun restrictions. He specifically complained that it is a felony for someone who went through a “messy divorce” and was under a restraining order to have a gun.
 
Klukowski said that he and Ken Blackwell have written a book called Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservativism can Save America and made an appeal for all stripes of conservatives – social, economic, and national security – to stop fighting each other and work together.

At End of Supreme Court Term, Right Wing Points to November

Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday, 7/1/2008 5:42 pm

According to Politico, the Right is warming to John McCain’s far-right stance on judicial appointments, and with the 5-4 decisions that closed out the Supreme Court’s term, we can see the outline of McCain’s and the Right’s campaign to get the base to turn out in November on the issue of judges.

Last month’s Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus was likened by the Right a “white flag of surrender” that would cause “more Americans to be killed”; Fred Thompson, a judicial advisor to John McCain, wrote that the “remedy” was for “concerned citizens to turn out on Election Day to elect a new president.”

The more recent decision overturning D.C.’s gun ban inspired Ted Nugent to write in Human Events that “the 5-4 ruling is another painful example” of “a divisive culture war raging on, and four supreme justices frighteningly disconnected from the heart and soul of America.” Michael Reagan warned that the majority “will vanish if the liberals manage to elect Barack Obama and give his party sufficient control of Congress to guarantee that future Court vacancies will be filled with activist liberal justices who will turn the Constitution upside down.”

The Family Research Council called the Second Amendment case “a reminder for voters of just how important the elections are this fall.”

The next President is likely to name 2-3 Supreme Court justices, who will be examining the constitutionality of a variety of laws for the next few decades. Life, marriage, and religious freedom are all issues that are likely to land in front of the Supreme Court. … For fiscal, social, and national defense conservatives, judges are one issue that brings all conservatives together.

According to the Weekly Standard, a case restricting capital punishment to murderers and not rapists of children demonstrated “that the fight to turn the Court from a capricious and imperious vanguard of liberalism into an impassive umpire is far from over.” The Standard’s Matthew Continetti advised McCain to “take this opportunity to explain how his judicial philosophy differs from Obama's, and why it matters.” A National Review editorial similarly responded, “Too many of our justices are evolving away from democracy. Let’s not elect a president who will encourage them — and appoint more of them.”

Traditional Values Coalition’s Lou Sheldon wrote that the death penalty case and the habeas corpus decision “are perfect examples showing why it’s important that Americans choose the right person to assume the Presidency in January 2009.”

The person who becomes President and Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces will likely have to replace Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter – all liberals who use their power to impose their leftist ideology upon all Americans. …

If we fail to put a man into the Oval Office who understands judicial restraint and the rule of law, our legal system will be set back 30 years. This is especially true if a liberal President appoints young liberals to the Court and fills up the federal judiciary with more radical leftist judges.

Finally, there’s the 5-4 decision overturning the “Millionaire’s Amendment,” a part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that lifted contribution limits for politicians facing self-funded opponents. Despite McCain’s role in originally passing the law, McCain supporter Hans von Spakovsky wrote that the narrow ruling “graphically illustrates just how important the next president's appointments to the Supreme Court will be to preserving our First Amendment rights in the political arena.”

“[G]iven the number of Supreme Court appointments a Democratic president will be able to make, an Obama victory will move America more radically leftward than ever in its history,” Dennis Prager summarized.

All these cases will continue to be cited by the Right in pushing its unmotivated constituency to the polls, as “are reminders that elections are not just about putting candidates in office for a few years,” as Thomas Sowell put it to those “who are thinking of venting their frustrations by voting for some third-party candidate that they know has no chance of being elected. There will be a president chosen this November, and he will appoint Supreme Court justices during his term, regardless of whether you stay home or go to the polls.”

Right Wing: Habeas Decision 'White Flag of Surrender'

Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday, 6/17/2008 9:01 am

Dissenting from last week’s Supreme Court decision recognizing habeas corpus rights for prisoners at Guantanamo, Justice Scalia all but called the judiciary, not to mention his colleagues on the High Court, a Fifth Column in the War on Terror: “[This decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he wrote. Not surprisingly, the Right Wing followed his lead.

Fred Thompson, the recent presidential candidate, said death would be a “tragically obvious” result:

I also find it just a tad ironic that in a case involving habeas corpus, which literally means that one must produce a body (or person) before a court to explain the basis on which that person is being detained, the decision of this court may mean more fallen bodies in the defense of a Constitution some of these justices ignored.

Gary Bauer decried “The radical Left and its liberal allies in Big Media” for supporting “an action beneficial to America’s wartime enemies”: “Whose side are they on?” The Weekly Standard editors similarly wrote, “In their visceral, myopic hatred of President Bush, liberals will see the ruling as a blow to the president and not the broad, foolish, and dangerous judicial power grab it is.”

The National Review denounced “the imperial court,” while the American Spectator’s John Tabin singled out the author of the majority opinion as “Lord Kennedy.” To the Wall Street Journal, he is “President Kennedy”; the editors warned of “another attack on U.S. soil – perhaps one enabled by a terrorist released under the Kennedy rules.”

Larry Thornberry attacked “the al-Qaeda wing of the U.S. Supreme Court.” Joseph Farah described the decision as “wav[ing] the white flag of surrender before al-Qaida and its Islamo-fascist allies throughout the world.”

Writing in FrontPage Magazine, Henry Mark Holzer—who warns that the U.S. will regret the decision “if the Nation lives”—brings it around to the presidential election:

For this constitutional and national security debacle, ultimately we have to thank not only the 5-justice majority but also justice-nominating and justice-confirming Republicans in the White House and Senate.

The Boumediene decision is thus a grave cautionary lesson about what is at stake in this presidential election: nothing less than the future of the Supreme Court for another generation, and with it the security of the United States of America.

Thompson, a prominent supporter of John McCain, similarly alluded to the issue of judges in the election: “What remedy do people have now if they don’t like the court’s decision? None. If that thought is not enough to cause concerned citizens to turn out on Election Day to elect a new president, then I don’t know what will be.”

As for McCain himself, he called this habeas corpus ruling “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Scalia Previews Right's Reaction to Habeas Corpus

Submitted by Anonymous on Thursday, 6/12/2008 4:06 pm

The Supreme Court narrowly ruled today in favor of the right of habeas corpus and against a piece of the Bush Administration’s practice of curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, both appointed by President Bush, joined Justices Scalia and Thomas in dissenting.

As is common, Scalia’s dissenting opinion provides a preview of the far Right’s reaction to the ruling. Scalia—one of the highest-ranking judges in the country—predicted that giving prisoners access to the judiciary is tantamount to murder:

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.

Noted by Brian Tamanaha.

Schlafly Snowed By Sen. Graham

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Tuesday, 7/18/2006 2:46 pm
Writing in Human Events, the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly attacks the Supreme Court, not only for its ruling in the Hamdan case, but for even hearing the case at all
The Supreme Court had no business taking the Hamdan case. Congress had passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 withdrawing jurisdiction over Guantanamo prisoners' habeas corpus petitions from every "court, justice, or judge" except the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court did not, and could not, dispute Congress' power to do exactly that. The U.S. Constitution clearly grants this power to Congress. But the court held that pending cases were exempt from this particular withdrawal of jurisdiction even though the law did not say that. Justice John Paul Stevens' majority decision ignored what Justice Scalia's dissent called a "plain directive," and (in the words of a primary sponsor of the Detainee Act, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.) "made legal contortions to get the result the Court wanted."
Relying on Sen. Lindsey Graham's interpretation of what the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 said about cases such as Hamdan is not particularly convincing, considering that he and Sen. Kyl snuck a bogus exchange into the Congressional Record in an attempt to make it look like Congress shared their view on this issue when that was not at all the case.
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Habeas Corpus Posts Archive

Barton: US Should Use Biblical Justice, Just As The Constitution Says
SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Wednesday 07/06/2011, 9:41am
Pseudo-historian David Barton visited Engage In Truth radio on Friday to share his right-wing view of American history and the Constitution. Without citing any evidence, David Barton said that the Due Process Clause and the Fourth and Eighth Amendments “all came out of the Bible.” Of course, Barton has a long track record of mentioning long lists of Bible verses which he believes inspired the drafters of the Constitution while never providing any proof to substantiate his claims. Barton then goes on to cite various trials in the Bible or of biblical figures as evidence of how... MORE
CPAC: Merit Selection for Judges is an Evil Leftist Plot
SUBMITTED BY: Peter Montgomery, Friday 02/11/2011, 3:35pm
A group of right-wing legal advocates warned CPAC participants – or more accurately, a tiny subset of CPAC participants – about “The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary.” Panelists discussed the meaning of “judicial activism” and why the kind of right-wing judicial activism we’ve seen from the Supreme Court doesn’t qualify. (Overturning health care reform? Also not judicial activism.) But the main thrust of the panel was the supposedly dire threat posed by efforts at the state level to replace judicial elections with a merit... MORE
CPAC: Merit Selection for Judges is an Evil Leftist Plot
SUBMITTED BY: Peter Montgomery, Friday 02/11/2011, 3:35pm
A group of right-wing legal advocates warned CPAC participants – or more accurately, a tiny subset of CPAC participants – about “The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary.” Panelists discussed the meaning of “judicial activism” and why the kind of right-wing judicial activism we’ve seen from the Supreme Court doesn’t qualify. (Overturning health care reform? Also not judicial activism.) But the main thrust of the panel was the supposedly dire threat posed by efforts at the state level to replace judicial elections with a merit... MORE
At End of Supreme Court Term, Right Wing Points to November
, Tuesday 07/01/2008, 5:42pm
According to Politico, the Right is warming to John McCain’s far-right stance on judicial appointments, and with the 5-4 decisions that closed out the Supreme Court’s term, we can see the outline of McCain’s and the Right’s campaign to get the base to turn out in November on the issue of judges. Last month’s Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus was likened by the Right a “white flag of surrender” that would cause “more Americans to be killed”; Fred Thompson, a judicial advisor to John McCain, wrote that the “remedy... MORE
Right Wing: Habeas Decision 'White Flag of Surrender'
, Tuesday 06/17/2008, 9:01am
Dissenting from last week’s Supreme Court decision recognizing habeas corpus rights for prisoners at Guantanamo, Justice Scalia all but called the judiciary, not to mention his colleagues on the High Court, a Fifth Column in the War on Terror: “[This decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he wrote. Not surprisingly, the Right Wing followed his lead. Fred Thompson, the recent presidential candidate, said death would be a “tragically obvious” result: I also find it just a tad ironic that in a case involving habeas... MORE
Scalia Previews Right's Reaction to Habeas Corpus
, Thursday 06/12/2008, 4:06pm
The Supreme Court narrowly ruled today in favor of the right of habeas corpus and against a piece of the Bush Administration’s practice of curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, both appointed by President Bush, joined Justices Scalia and Thomas in dissenting. As is common, Scalia’s dissenting opinion provides a preview of the far Right’s reaction to the ruling. Scalia—one of the highest-ranking judges in the country—predicted that giving prisoners access to the judiciary is... MORE
Schlafly Snowed By Sen. Graham
SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Tuesday 07/18/2006, 2:46pm
Writing in Human Events, the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly attacks the Supreme Court, not only for its ruling in the Hamdan case, but for even hearing the case at all The Supreme Court had no business taking the Hamdan case. Congress had passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 withdrawing jurisdiction over Guantanamo prisoners' habeas corpus petitions from every "court, justice, or judge" except the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court did not, and could not, dispute Congress' power to do exactly that. The U.S. Constitution clearly grants this power to... MORE