Not a good analogy. The Constitutions explicitly allows the suspension of habeas corpus under certain circumstances:
“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
It does not allow the suspension of the Bill or Rights.
Only a republican president can do this.
Signed
A republican
I think the question should be. Will Americans roll over and hand their weapons in? I believe the answer is no. to try and force them to do so could result in a blood bath. It is not always a question of creating laws, it is the practicality of enforcing them
In answer to your question. The majority of police officers in the UK do not carry guns, if I have a tail light out I am pulled over for a conversation about what I intend to do to rectify the problem, I do not get threatened with deadly force, our armed police are called to deal with situations that warrant the use of firearms. Maybe the American police should follow the example of some European countries where the majority of policing is carried out by the police who keep guns in their holsters or work without firearms
The overwhelming majority of police work is done with sidearms in holsters.
Yes, but you live in a country where your murder rate per year is less than a 1000 for all types (i.e. knives, guns, etc etc). Our murder rate for knives alone is higher than your entire rate, let alone guns. It’s apples to oranges, and you are really in no position to dictate or even suggest what police our police SHOULD be following based on your situation when it’s so different than ours.
Basically there are over a million police in the US (to put it in perspective, we have a police force that’s larger than half a percent of your total population in the UK), and they make millions of traffic stops and other things every day. Of those millions, occasionally something goes wrong. And, since we are a 24/7 news shop who is also under the worlds microscope those very few incidents get blasted out into the news.
Sure, he’s the president. He can sign any executive order he wants.
Whether such order is executed is another question. The courts would almost certainly strike it down unless this were some extraordinary circumstance such as Martians invading and saying they will exterminate us if we don’t give up all our firearms.
But, as already noted, the presidential power has initiative. There’s nothing stopping Obama from doing it other than his reluctance to commit political suicide and cause mass panic/insurrection.
davidmich, *your own OP quote *contains the following:
So it would seem POTUS can’t just pull an “emergency” out of his hat to do anything he damn well wants (well, OK, strictly speaking he “can” but as mentioned it would almost certainly fail if he doesn’t have a damned good explanation why it should be so)
(and BTW really one gets tired of the consistent harping of alternating fringes about how whoever’s the sitting President is just feverishly chomping at the bit to go Bonaparte/Caesar on the Republic…)
Also, what happened was that as soon as the way that Lincoln exerted his authority was ruled out of bounds by the courts, the Congress itself passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863 to provide a legal way around it. So what was decided was that in order to declare suspension of habeas corpus in such a manner, you needed an Act of Congress. By analogy one could theorize that any similar suspension of an explicit constitutional right that is not narrowly case-specific would also require an Act of Congress (unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans, the society and culture of 1942 considered racial minorities a fair game specific case for discriminatory treatment anyway).
The US Constitution, contrary to say the French 5th Republic’s, does leave the specifics of emergency powers as something implicit, to be addressed by statute and interpretation and tradition – and if asked about it the Judiciary will answer “the court does not address hypotheticals, bring it to us when someone IS harmed”.
*Hi,
In the wake of so much scandalous and violent rhetoric against police officers in the US in recent months, what can the President do with his emergency powers? The peace is threatened. If the President does have the power to act forcefully to restrict this rhetoric, would it violate the First Amendment?*
Yes. Though I could see President Trump attempting to do such a thing.*
*we’ve already seen Attorney General Lynch promise to prosecute those who engage in anti-Muslim rhetoric that “edges toward violence” (though she retreated in the face of protest).
That quote is wildly taken out of context by contemporary gun rights advocates. To say that it means that Gandhi would support Second Amendment rights in the US is an extreme oversimplification on his views that overlooks the historical context behind the original quote.
This article provides some of the missing context. It’s an interesting read.
I have been pulled over probably 50 times in the past 40 years and 1 000 000 miles of driving, and never once did I ever worry about being shot by the cop … for everything from speeding to tail light or headlight out, random inspection because I did something silly/stupid while driving and even once because I was driving a car that matched one that was just used as an escape vehicle by a bank robbery.
We saved all the melted/burnt/ruined weapons [knife, sword and firearms] in our fire, if we are ever forced to turn over weapons, those will be the ones turned over. We do not have any officially registered weapons [name associated with serial number] in our possession. The 2 we did have were damaged beyond repair in the fire and claimed on our insurance and the state notified of the loss.
See above answer, but the response would be ‘technically yes’ but realistically no.
Ask me when a three year old gets drunk, takes mom’s car for a joy ride and kills somebody.
And then you’ll answer the questions without a non-sequitur strawman? Ok…guess we’ll await your answer for that low probability event then. Thanks for playing…
For the record, this was not Gandhi calling for armed Indians to resist the Raj, but just the opposite: the quote was in an appeal for Indians to fight as part of the British Empire against His Majesty’s enemies.
This is ridiculous, you’ve been watching far too much TV if you think American police regularly threaten people with firearms for routine traffic violations.
Well to be fair people were disarmed by the police after Katrina although the action was declared unconstitutional.
You might have noticed quite a few videos over the past few years of cops stopping people for routine violations and suddenly opening fire on them. Every few weeks there’s another incident where the cops shoot somebody for vague reasons. Yes, it’s big country with 300 million people. But this sort of thing didn’t just start happening, it’s been going on for centuries, the only difference is that nowadays the cops are getting recorded.