Griffin Misleads on NDAA (Part 1 of 3 on NDAA)

PART 2 here

Congressman Tim Griffin is a lawyer by trade, so he ought to know better than to make the claims he does about the NDAA.   This act is a far more serious violation of your rights than even the awful “Obamacare” requirement that you purchase health insurance. Let me say this again, the NDAA of 2012, which was supported by most Democrats and almost all Republicans, including our entire Arkansas federal delegation, is a far greater infringement of your rights than Obamacare. It represents a serious degradation of habeas corpus, and a violation of the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments, as well as a defacto loss of the seventh.  

Our ruling class seems very nervous.  I suppose I would be too if I had allowed the Federal Reserve to create trillions of dollars out of thin air and essentially give it to multi-national banks and associated corporations while telling Joe Six-Pack that the new money is a debt he now owes and that he needs to sacrifice his Social Security, Medicare, Education, etc. to pay it back. I suspect that is what is coming as the magnitude of the looting becomes manifest. 

Fraud is an interesting crime. For a while, the perpetrators and the victims both think they have the money, and so everyone is happy. Bernie Madoff’s “clients” were happy even for years after Madoff stole their money, because they did not realize it was gone. Today’s political class has stolen our money, but like Madoff they are able to arrange things for a while to make it appear to us that the money is not gone.  Unlike Madoff, they are in position to make preparations so that once the fraud is discovered and people do become upset, they are not arrested for ripping us off, but rather we are to be arrested if we complain about it too strenuously.

But I digress.  I am going to give you the facts.  It is then up to you to determine which of us is more honest with you, me or Tim Griffin. One of us has to be feeding you misinformation. At the end of it, I invite you to decide whose credibility is lost, mine or his.

Griffin in his piece assures us that the law merely “codifies what the U.S. Supreme Court already said: The detainee provisions in the 2012 NDAA in no way undermine a U.S. citizen’s due process or habeas rights, as some have claimed.”     He is talking about the decision(s) in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

If the NDAA really did just “codify” “what the court already said” about habeas corpus in Hamdi, then among those “some” claiming it is an infringement would Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (joined by liberal John Paul Stevens). 

Scalia is revered by many as the most brilliant legal mind in this nation.   According to the Wiki article in his powerful dissent on the case “Scalia asserted that based on historical precedent, the government had only two options to detain Hamdi: either Congress must suspend the right to habeas corpus, or Hamdi must be tried under normal criminal law. Scalia wrote that the plurality, though well-meaning, had no basis in law for trying to establish new procedures that would be applicable in a challenge to Hamdi's detention—it was only the job of the Court to declare it unconstitutional and order his release or proper arrest, rather than to invent an acceptable process for detention.” 

I’m with Scalia on this one. They should not be in the business of crafting a “due-process lite” for these situations, which is exactly what they were trying to do. 

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