Emphasis added
Last week, Obama signed a bill letting him detain U.S. citizens in military custody without convicting them of anything — not for a month or a year, but potentially forever.
Obama pledges he will never use that power to hold an American. But Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the bill originally applied only to noncitizens. Citizens were included, he said, at the request of the White House.
I suppose some Democrats might be satisfied with the White House’s flimsy and transparent posturing. Apparently this noxious provison must have somehow snuck in when Obama wasn’t looking. Hey, it must be bad advisers, yeah, that’s it, the classic excuse of presidents, my advisers made me do it.
It is contemptible that a president that would support a law that shreds the Constitution. Period. I don’t care what party he is in.
Gordon Hirabayshi was imprisoned during WWII for defying the government’s internment of Japanese-Americans. After four decades of fighting, his conviction was overturned.
“I want vindication not only for myself,” he said in 1985. “I also want the cloud removed from over the heads of 120,000 others. My citizenship didn’t protect me one bit. Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper.”
And it’s being reduced to a scrap of paper again.