Thursday, August 10, 2006

champaign

* kathleen in the comments:
' It's tommorrow and it's still real!!!!

I'm partial to bubbly and I'm gonna give my Bellinis a French twist. French 75 is a great champaign drink, 4 bottles of champaign, one bottle of brandy. So, I'm gonna make it with peach brandy. I'm purposely spelling it "champaign" for political celebrations."
lol.

* damien in the comments:
"...on the War Crimes fixit, I can't imagine constitutional scholars having any difficulty with this. Let's see: the Bushies legislate to produce legal immunity by ex post facto legislation. With that principle of jurisprudence being accepted then there should be no objections to overturning the very same immunity by ex post facto legislation.
[]
But it would seem to me there are no legal impediments at all to overturning ex post facto legislation, particularly in the egregious case of war crimes. This from Len Hart at ExistentialistCowboy:
"That Bush began the war against Iraq upon a criminal fraud, the war itself is a violation of the Nuremberg Principles which the U.S. literally insisted upon at the end of WWII. Moreover, because Bush violated Nuremberg, he is therefore in violation of U.S. Criminal Codes; Section 2441 which makes deaths resulting from war crimes (violations of Nuremberg specifically) CAPITAL CRIMES!""

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Len Hart has a number of terrific posts on US law and Bush war crimes.

He quotes Article I, Section 8, US Constitution: "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.". That's black letter law. Ex post facto legislation is against the Constitution. Period.

He also notes that "Congress does not have the authority to reverse a decision of the supreme court"- specifically in Hamdan v Rumsfeld.

Supreme Court Justices can be removed by "Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Since their oath of office obliges them to uphold provisions of the Constitution, any failure to uphold an explicit provision such as Article I, Section 8 would certainly constitute a "high Crime or Misdemeanor". The fact that no SCJ has ever been impeached should not stand in the way here.(link)

I imagine the American Bar Association would have something to say along these lines.

Anonymous said...

Damien:

Yuuuuuuum!