01
Mar
2011
Napolitano Not a Fan of Lincoln
Wouldn’t it be neat if, say, you had Andrew Napolitano talking about Abraham Lincoln? Oh, and the person asking him about it was, say, Ralph Nader? (This sounds like a really high-brow Frank Caliendo sketch by this point.) But actually, it happened (HT2 LRC):
I wish I could click this. I am on a ship at sea, and videos are blocked. Tom Woods’ blog is blocked too, albeit for different reasons: his blog is blocked because it it is considered (by our IT dept.) to be “marketing/merchandising.”
You may want to use a proxy server to get around the blocks. In highschool, my friends and I would use these all the time to check our facebook profiles or play games during lunch.
Here’s a list.
http://www.publicproxyservers.com/proxy/list1.html
Napolitano had a really good chapter about Lincoln is his book The Constitution in Exile. Oddly enough, Google Books erroneously displays A Nation Of Sheep when I click on The Constitution in Exile entry. And I gave my copy of that book away some time ago.
So I guess you’ll have to take my good word that “Napolitano had a really good chapter about Lincoln is his book The Constitution in Exile”.
Napalitano iss a complete idiot about LIncoln. First of all, the supposed violation of habeas — here is a clue, the Constitution ITSELF says habeas can be suspended in times of “war or rebellion”.
A “little fact” the hate monger “forgets”to tell people. The Consitution does not say WHO can suspend it — it leaves that vague. Lincoln suspended it when the Congress was NOT in secession, in fact, many of them had seceded. As soon as Congress did get back, they passed authorization for it.
The South, on the other hand, had for 50 years violently suppressed free speech and free press, NOT by presidental or Congresssional action, but by violence and terror. Somewhow — that is fine with the hate monger judge. The Southern states all pass “anit-incdeniary laws” probhibiting even preachers from speaking against slavery– see http://violentsuppression.blogspot.com/
Men like Napaletino are disgusting cowards and liars.
The government’s ability to suspend Habeus rights is not universal during war. By your argument we should have no problem if Obama decided tomorrow that Habeus rights were suspended (although it technically has been true for nearly a decade. American citizens can be deemed “enemy combatants” and locked up indefinitely without charges) and he started locking up dissidents like Lincoln did. As you said we are at war.
To suspend habeus rights would require that there is such disorder that the courts cannot function. This wasn’t even remotely the case in the North. Lincoln was jailing opposing newspaper editors and even had an opposition politician exiled from the country.
Bringing up Southern transgressions is a clear red herring and does nothing to take away from the fact that Lincoln regularly acted outside the bounds of the constitution and should be considered a tyrant. Even those that praise him call him the “benevolent dictator”.
Here’s a rehashing of Chief Justice Roger Taney’s arguments against the constitutionality of Lincoln’s Habeus suspension:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/young-andrew7.html
That’s pretty good. You call him a liar and a coward but don’t offer anything that he lied about. Even the Lincoln cult doesn’t disagree with what Napolitano said about Lincoln in that interview. They just defend him as a benevolent dictator as Jeremy pointed out.
Every other country was able to end slavery without murdering their own citizens and that alone should be enough to condem Lincoln (although there is many other reasons, like colonization). 600,000 dead and millions wounded and Lincoln should be revered?
Mark, unfortunately the Congress NOT the Executive has the authority to suspend H.C. So what Lincoln did was expressly an un-constitutional usuperation of power. It is located in Article I Section 9. This is an enumeration of congressional power. You are completely in error about this.
Lincoln killed and ran off northern newspaper editors/owners and had some of these buildings burned down. If you are going to dislike the South for that then you may as well do the same to the North so as to not be a hypocrite.
To be accurate, Article I section 9 is a limitation on on Congressional power; section 8 is the grant of powers. It is a difficult question as to what this means, constitutionally speaking. There was never a grant of power to suspend habeus corpus in section 8, so why would it have to be limited? One school of thought believes that this means that there is an implied power to suspend the writ. Whether this power is in congress, the president, or both is debatable.
That is not to say that Lincoln’s particular actions in suspending the writ was justified or not.
That being said, there is no doubt that Lincoln acted to curtain civil liberties. However, the heroic and romantic view of the south in the civil war does a great disservice to the liberty movement. You can criticize Lincoln without loving the group that started the war to retain slavery.
I don’t romanticize the South, I despise all governments, but how did they start a war to retain slavery? They wanted to secede, not to take over the North. The North started the war and Lincoln was perfectly fine with allowing slavery to keep the union together. He even supported deporting all the slaves up until the time of his death.
No, John.
Article I deals with Congress alone. It is indeed implying that Congress has the authority to suspend HC “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Are you denying there is a debate, or that the provisions are vague or ambiguous? In your post you said that suspending the write was an enumerated power. It is not. You are in error. Its ok, its an easy mistake to make.
It seems strange to me that the grant of a congressional power would be found in the section of the constitution limiting congressional power. I’m not saying that the view is wrong; I’m just saying that the issue is not as clear as you seem to make it.
Incidentally, your position seems very open to allowing the recognition of implied government power.
I don’t think any non-invested academic who knows about Lincoln beyond their public school indoctrination likes Lincoln!
The problem is, how many non-Lincoln-invested academics are there? Most people, and academic’s included, just assume Lincoln was some kind of hero.