President Bush and his Executive Order - the takedown of the Fifth Amendment
Jay Redding has a long and detailed analysis of President Bush's
Executive Order -- and the so-called 'Overruling' of the Fifth Amendment.
It is too detailed to really excerpt properly but here are a few paragraphs just to give a small taste:
No, The Fifth Amendment Has Not Been “Overruled”
Another round of left-wing hysteria is hitting sites like Digg and Slashdot making the argument that President Bush has (gasp!) “overturned” the Fifth Amendment with this Executive Order. As typical, this hysteria is completely unwarranted by the facts.
Presidents have traditionally had the power to order the seizure of assets during wartime. The most famous case dealing with this issue, and one of the most important cases in Constitutional Law is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). That case deals with President Truman’s attempted government seizure of a steel mill that produced war goods for the Korean War. Workers at the mill had gone on strike, and Truman had decided to seize the mill rather than risk it being shut down.
One more:
It’s the “boy who cried wolf” problem. If we have hysterical cries about civil rights all the time based on nothing more than partisan prejudices, it’s a lot harder for people to take real violations of civil rights seriously. These frequently hysterical accusations numb people to the idea that the government can take actions which are deeply injurious to the Constitution. If 99% of the time a claim of an action being unconstitutional is a silly partisan argument, that 1% can easily slip by the consciousness of the public.
This Executive Order is a straightforward invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. It is not a “power grab” by the Bush Administration — it was passed by Congress in 1977, during the Carter Administration. It is not an unprecedented act, every President since has invoked the IEEPA for various reasons. It does not apply to groups who are not giving material support to terrorist groups in Iraq. It does not remove anyone’s right to judicial redress. It can be overridden by an act of Congress. It does not “trample on the Constitution,” it does not “overrule” the Fifth Amendment, and it does not signal the dawn of fascism.
Take the twenty minutes to read this essay -- you will find it time well spent.
Posted by DaveH at July 20, 2007 10:48 PM