“No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed.”If you are like most Americans you didn’t know they were in the Constitution and, if you knew, don’t know what they mean.
A bill of attainder is a way of targeting a specific enemy under the disguise of the law. It would say something like, “George Soros is to be arrested and put in jail for ten years.” There is no trial, no appeal and no due process. You can see how this would be a problem. This restraint needs to be kept in mind.
Ex post facto means to pass a law after the fact and have it apply before it was passed. The government has found many ways to do this. They change tax laws for previous years. They make things illegal that have been legal throughout our history. One example would deal with attempts at gun control. You are not supposed to be able to make something illegal that has a long history of common usage.
Where am I going with this. I think that the Republicans need to sit down and start working on some science fiction legislation. Good science fiction involves guessing or predicting what is coming and telling a good story based on what they think. We need to start writing laws to deal with situations that seem to be developing. We need clearer definitions of what treason is. We need to have laws stating clearly that government employees who use their position to mistreat others need to do some hard time. We have been watching the alphabet agencies get away with just about everything short of murder. We have the courts saying that it is okay for police to lie to you. We need to look forward and develop some way to deal with people who deliberately teach things that undermine the Constitution when they are being paid by tax money. The intent of the laws needs to be spelled out so clearly that the Supreme Court has no wiggle room.
There are some slippery slopes here. I know that. We need to have discussions and arguments about what this would look like.
Meanwhile we need to enforce the laws we have. We need to remove the Teflon coating that allows James Comey to lie to the nation on live TV and walk away. That is just one example. We need to find the leakers of confidential information. We need to find out who felt the need to send armed swat teams to arrest Roger Stone instead of simply having the chaplain deliver an arrest warrant.
There is a lot that can be done with planning and a bit of courage. Do our elected officials know about either one?
homo unius libri
Amen.
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