Tag: Chief Justice Taney

When Does a Tyrant Come Out of the Closet? When a Crisis Hits!

These days as Americans are bombarded with the names Whitmer (MI), Cuomo (NY) and Newsom (CA) leading the charge for born-again tyrants, we probably should look into history to see who might have modeled this best. Being confronted with a crisis reveals the true character of most people, and when these people are politicians, the resulting decisions in the reaction to times of crisis “try men’s souls”.

In my last post I said:

The GOP is stuck because the DNA in their party rests with Abraham Lincoln and his reaction to having seven states PEACEFULLY secede from the united States of America (written as it was inked in the 1783 Paris Peace treaty with the British Empire).

I bet you can guess who I am going to pick on once again. Yes, that president we all know and love from our grade school days, Honest Abe.

We also know from our last post that Lincoln’s reaction to these states leaving the union was NOT to free the slaves, no way, no how. He actually said on 04MAR1861:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

So after Lincoln tried to “resupply” Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor with TROOPS which triggered, no pun intended, the Confederate forces to pro-actively open the cannons on that fort to force its surrender, with ZERO deaths, Lincoln proceeded to accomplish a long list of decisions the cemented his inner tyrant behavior.

While the calling up of 75,000 volunteers from the remaining states in the union after the surrender of Fort Sumter was based on a 1795 act of Congress that gave the president to call up troops in case of insurrection, this act only allowed 30 days until the president’s authority would cease. Lincoln would milk this for FOUR months before Congress was called into session! Not only that, to add insult to injury, he asked Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri to send troops to fight against their culturally “sister” states as well.

The letters from the governors of these states is hilarious, the best first line of the response from Tennessee is priceless:

Your dispatch is received, and if genuine, which its extraordinary character leads me to doubt .. I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of this country, and to this war on the liberties of a free people ..

What they did not know was this was only the beginning of the reveal show that Lincoln would unfold in 1861. By 21APR1861 he ordered the blockade of southern ports (an act of war) and the purchase of five naval warships, without congressional approval. On 27APR1861 he suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus nullifying every civil liberty of every citizen.

On 03MAY1861 Lincoln called up even more troops, this time for a three year enlistment! He also directed the Treasury Department to pay a private firm in New York state $2.0M for military equipment and by 04JUL1861 when Congress was finally called into session, war plans to invade the southern 11 states were already made.

If this were not bad enough, the night of 12SEP1861 he had Maj. Gen. Banks arrest all the Southern sympathizers of the Maryland legislature, 51 citizens in all, to prevent them from voting on secession.

Then, in NOV1861, to ensure southern sympathizers would not vote in Maryland, armed Union troops with bayonets guarded the polling places AND all the Union troops got to vote, even if they were not residents of Maryland.

In Britain, London’s Saturday Review commented:

It was a perfect act of despotism as can be conceived. It was a coup d’etat in every essential feature.

Any Northern press that criticized this the same way was shutdown:

  • Chicago Daily Times
  • The Journal of Commerce (NYC)
  • The Morning News (NYC)
  • The Day-Book
  • The New York World
  • The Freeman’s Journal (Catholic NYC)
  • Philadelphia Evening Journal
  • Christian Observer
  • Republican Watchman (PA)
  • Farmer (ME)
  • Democrat (NH)

Not only were these and another 1,000 newspapers were shutdown, the people involved (up to 10,000) were imprisoned without trial. Newspapers not shutdown were highly regulated throughout the war and censored.

This is only the beginning as Lincoln attempted to have the Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney who had ruled against Lincoln, in the case of Ex Parte Merryman (1861), arrested!.

Talk about the poster child for tyranny. Lincoln is the master.

So look at a picture of your governor or your president or possible next president and know what our US Constitution (and the state constitutions modeled after it) will allow in times of crisis.

I think we are about to see a “Lincoln redux” in action soon all across our land. 1861 was not an easy time to live through in many parts of this country!

Gov. Whitmer – Michigan

 

 

Gov. Cuomo – New York
Gov. Newsom – California
President Donald J. Trump – United States of America
Joe Biden – Possible Future President of the United States

Peace out.

-SF1

Is Trump To Follow in Lincoln’s Footsteps? – Stay Tuned!

The Articles of Confederation, which had the word “perpetual” in it, was cast aside in replacing it with the US Constitution in 1787. Prophetic Patrick Henry said:

I smell a rat.

Yes, and with that move the United States began a constant assault on the personal liberties and freedoms the Declaration of Independence declared.

While George Washington himself allowed crisis to over-rule the Law of the Land (i.e. US Constitution), no one did it in a bigger way (to date) than Abraham Lincoln. All it took was for the state of Virginia to change its mind on secession after Lincoln decided to call up 75,000 volunteer troops to “suppress the rebellion” (actually, the peaceful departure of seven southern states of the Deep South). Washington DC was then faced, literally, with a land now belonging to the Confederate States of America across the Potomac River. In response to this development, the thought of Maryland also seceding had Lincoln and his cabinet in panic from consequences of THEIR OWN actions. Potential peace negotiators had attempted to meet with Lincoln and his leadership all during March 1861 but Lincoln refused that peace could be a viable option, for the “union”. He simply would not settle for a divorce from seven states that had been abused by the union for decades, and decided to get that spouse “back in the trailer”.

Can we do something different than Lincoln’s violent response to a divided country where at the end of Lincoln’s war, 2.5% of the population perished? (750,000 by 1865, 7 million in 2020) I highly doubt President Trump would allow the following to happen .. to allow the regions to heal better from the current ECONOMIC crisis disguised as a health crisis:

.. we will see. I think he is pure Lincoln material unfortunately.

Back to Lincoln and what he faced in late April 1861 .. James Dueholm paints the picture in this article:

27April 1861:

Lincoln issued an order to General Winfield Scott authorizing him to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, at or near any military line between Philadelphia and Washington if the public safety required it.  Lincoln issued his order pursuant to the provision in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution stating that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion and invasion the public safety may require it,”

A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody. A habeas corpus petition is a petition filed with a court by a person who objects to his own or another’s imprisonment.

Laurence M. Vance explains:

The origins of what Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase called “the most important human right in the Constitution … the best and only sufficient defense of personal freedom,” go back to the Magna Carta: “No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [seized] or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” (Magna Carta, sec. 39). The English Petition of Right (1628) and Habeas Corpus Act (1679), as well as our own Constitution and The Judiciary Act of 1789 (which established the detailed organization of the federal judiciary), all mention this “fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action” (Justice Abe Fortas).

One problem with the way Lincoln pulled this off, it was Congress that was supposed to do this, and Congress would not be called into session until 04JUL1861 by Lincoln!

Lincoln had decided on 15APR1861 to delay calling Congress to order until the 4th of July so that the war on the insurrection could already have gained enough momentum and that the official narrative could have taken hold in the hearts and minds of the people in the north and west (Midwest) United States.

25May1861:

On May 25, federal troops arrested John Merryman in Cockeysville, Maryland, for recruiting, training, and leading a drill company for Confederate service. Merryman’s lawyer promptly petitioned Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, sitting as a trial judge, for a writ of habeas corpus. This writ, sometimes called the Great Writ, is a judicial writ addressed to a jailer ordering him to come to court with his prisoner and explain why the prisoner is being held.

Following a hearing in the matter, Taney ordered delivery of a writ of habeas corpus to General George Cadwallader directing him to appear before Taney on May 28 with Merryman in tow. After Cadwallader refused service of the writ, Taney ruled on May 28 that the president did not have the power to suspend the writ, and Taney announced that he later would issue an opinion in support of his ruling.

Several days later, Taney issued his opinion. Only Congress, he said, could suspend the writ of habeas corpus. He observed that the limitation on suspension of the writ appeared in Article I of the Constitution, dealing with legislative powers, not in Article II, which established executive power. He explored the history of the writ of habeas corpus under English law, showing that the House of Commons had limited and then abolished the royal power to suspend the writ, leaving suspension in legislative hands. The Constitution, he said, embodied this English tradition. Article II, he asserted, gave the president very limited powers that were weakened further by the Bill of Rights. Finally, he cited eminent authority, noting that Chief Justice John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Story, a luminary as both judge and scholar, had all acknowledged that the power to suspend was a congressional power.

Lincoln’s reaction, in October of 1861 Lincoln ordered the District of Columbia Provost Marshal to place armed sentries around the home of a Washington, D.C. Circuit Court judge and place him under house arrest. The reason was that the judge had issued a writ of habeas corpus to a young man being detained by the Provost Marshal, allowing the man to have due process. By placing the judge under house arrest Lincoln prevented the judge from attending the hearing of the case.

Chief Justice Taney

After the fact, in 1863, Congress finally caught up with Lincoln’s violation of the Constitution and covered for their dictator:

Congress did not enact legislation authorizing suspension of habeas corpus until March 3, 1863. In the meantime, Lincoln’s 1861 orders authorizing suspension remained in force, and on September 24, 1862, he issued a proclamation imposing martial law and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. The proclamation orders that, for the rest of the war, (i) “all rebels and insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid or comfort to rebels against the authority of the United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by courts martial or military commission,” and (ii) “the writ of habeas corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested or imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prison, or other place of confinement by any military authority or by the sentence of any court martial or military commission.”

Lincoln’s response to an obedient Congress:

“You ask … whether I really claim that I may override all the guarantied rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the public safety—when I may choose to say the public safety requires it. This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the public safety does require, in cases of rebellion or invasion. The constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur for decision, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide it. By necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is to be made, from time to time; and I think the man whom, for the time, the people have, under the constitution, made the commander-in-chief, of their Army and Navy, is the man who holds the power….”

So this arrogant and pompous President, actually, a dictator at this point, said “public safety” in the middle of this crisis mandated that SOMEONE decides to remove the writ of habeas corpus.

Can you see Trump saying this? Yes you can! If you are honest with yourself.

Think about it.

Stay tuned!

-SF1