In United States v Bond, The Supreme Court Could Be Ruling On The Safety Of All American Rights
October 31, 2013 by Sam
Rolley
On more than one occasion President Barack Obama or a top Administration
official has lamented that the Commander in Chief is not a king or a dictator
and is, therefore, unable to ram his progressive policies down the greater
American public's collective throat as quickly as his liberal supporters would
like. And on several occasions, the sole hurdle halting the President in his
dash toward liberal utopia-or totalitarian hell, depending on whom you ask - has
been a pesky 226-year-old document called the Constitution of the United States
of America.
But the Obama Justice Department is working to change that.
Attorneys at the Justice Department are currently working to advance a
Supreme Court argument that the Federal government should be allowed to invoke
international treaties as legal basis for policies that government officials are
unable to put into place because they conflict with the Nation's
Constitution.
The Supreme Court is slated to begin hearing oral arguments in United
States v Bond early next month - a case in which the court will determine,
according to SCOTUSblog:
In short, United States v Bond concerns a woman poisoning her husband's mistress and, in doing so, violating the international ban on chemical weapons. Per the Constitution, the woman should be prosecuted at the State level - but the Federal government prosecuted her under the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act.(1) Whether the Constitution's structural limits on Federal authority impose any constraints on the scope of Congress' authority to enact legislation to implement a valid treaty, at least in circumstances where the Federal statute, as applied, goes far beyond the scope of the treaty, intrudes on traditional state prerogatives, and is concededly unnecessary to satisfy the government's treaty obligations; and (2) whether the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, 18 U.S.C. § 229, can be interpreted not to reach ordinary poisoning cases, which have been adequately handled by state and local authorities since the Framing, in order to avoid the difficult Constitutional questions involving the scope of and continuing vitality of this Court's decision in Missouri v Holland.
That is the same Act that Syrian Dictator Bashir al-Assad is a accused of violating and is the justification that many war-hungry politicians recently used as basis for a military attack on the Syrian government.
The Constitutional question is whether the Federal government can use
treaties that Congress has ratified as Federal policy.
A 1920 Supreme Court ruling in Missouri v Holland upheld a treaty
requiring the Federal government to enact laws regulating migratory birds after
a similar statute was deemed unConstitutional in a lower court. At the time,
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that treaty power extends beyond Congress's
regular lawmaking clout.During a speech at the Heritage Foundation this week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) explained the danger in accepting the Justice Department's argument that international treaties and Federal policy are intertwined in domestic matters.
"If the broad interpretation of the Missouri v Holland snippet is
accurate . you now have a roadmap - if you find the limitations on the Federal
government's authority irksome, any President has a simple path to get around
it," Cruz said. "Find any nation in the world, negotiate a treaty agreeing to do
what you couldn't do otherwise, and if the Senate ratifies it - and by the way
that means you can cut the House of Representatives out of everything - then
suddenly the Federal government has authority it didn't have before.
"That is a radical interpretation of the treaty power. That is what is at
issue in Bond: does the treaty power enable the Federal government to
circumvent the structural limitations on the authority of the Federal
government?" Cruz continued.
If that is the case, the Senator surmised that the President could even go so
far as signing a treaty giving away any American rights protected by the
Constitution.
"The proposition that the Treaty Clause is a trump card that defeats all of
the remaining structural limitations on the Federal government is not a
proposition that is logically defensible," Cruz said.
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