Why do we have separate statutes for terrorism and murder?
Probably the best argument for treason is that President Johnson’s pardon explicitly calls out “treason” as the crime be pardoned. But does the president get to decide what is and what is not treason? Are we certain how a court case would have turned out had someone like, say, R.E. Lee had been tried for treason? Where would the trial have been and from what pool of citizenry would the jurors have been pulled from?
Huh? For one thing, terrorism can occur without anyone being killed.
Seems to me that rebellion is a lesser included offense, especially in cases where there may not be two witnesses against the accused, as required by the Constitution.
Why is this even a legal question? The word existed for ~500 years before the US existed, and the concept is far older.
This is easily dismissed, as the constitution trumps the US code quite handily and the constitution has no such contradiction - it defines treason in no uncertain terms. But even dismissing that, it’s possible for an act to be illegal for multiple reasons and covered by multiple laws. Certainly that doesn’t allow for double jeopardy or the like so in general prosecutors must pick one, but the existence of other, narrower violations doesn’t undermine broader ones.
Could be, but how does one tell? If the statutes were organized where one was clearly subordinate to the others, it would be obvious. But they are listed just one after the other.
No, it’s not easily dismissed. You don’t get tried for violating the constitution. The constitution authorizes Congress to make laws for which people are tried.
And the terms are not so uncertain as you seem to think. The southern states fought a war against the northern states, not against “The United States”. How can a stet fight a war against itself?
To simplify things a bit for clarity: If Nebraska and Kansas starting firing at each other, which one would be committing treason and which one not?
Or, what if every state in the union were to go to war with Washington DC. Would all the states be committing treason?
Whether or not it was treason isn’t even up for debate, but the elite were the guilty party. The rank and file were cannon fodder forced into battle regardless of belief, just like in every other war declared by the elite. Therein lies the irony of commemorating Confederate leaders: Jefferson Davis and all the rest should be reviled for what they did to the South, and southern families.
You get tried for breaking the law (which in this case is the US code). Nobody is asking if the Confederates were tried in a court of law and found guilty. The question is, did the acts performed constitute treason? And according to the constitution, yes, they did. Oddly, treason is about the only act the constitution specifically defines and does not leave up to congress:
Note the use of Shall. Not may, or must, but shall. This has significant legal meaning and is not just a casual turn of phrase.
You missed the part where I said it’s worth exploring the concept that the Confederates were no longer part of the United States before waging war against them. However, they most certainly opposed every means by which you can define the United States. They opposed the constitution itself and the government established thereby. Remember, the Confederates had their own, different constitution. The CSA was in no way the USA, and upon the opening of belligerence between those two parties, the CSA was most definitely an enemy of the USA.
The question is, were any of the people living in the CSA citizens of the USA? If so, treason, if not, then not treason.
That depends on circumstances not defined in the question. Which state, if not both nor neither, has the full backing of the legitimate government of the USA as established in the constitution? The answer to your question is the citizens of the state that is not the answer to my question. Citizens, because states can’t really commit treason.
Assuming by Washington DC you mean the legitimate government of the USA as established by the US constitution, then yes, the citizens of those states participating in belligerence against the US Federal government would be committing treason.
Because that’s the law, and laws are enforced by gunpoint. You don’t get to wake up one morning and say “I’m tired of these bullshit laws my parents agreed to.” Anyhow, the rest of the country bent over backwards to make concessions regarding slavery to entice these states to join the union. The Southern states were treated with excess coddling, pampering, and deference about getting to keep slavery… and then they threw a hissy fit over not getting to EXPAND slavery.
You understand this is what the Civil War was about, right? There was no proposal to end slavery in the southern states. They wanted to expand slavery to new states admitted to the union, and they threw a hissy fit when everybody else reject this fool idea.
The South should have been crushed to dust and occupied for 3 generations. They’re lucky to have gotten off with Jim Crow, Fox News, and a bunch of shitty statues.
Those are all, I am sure, interesting opinions, but they are not facts. The fact is, no one was ever tried for treason (in the context of what we are discussing here), and so we don’t know how what the verdicts would have been. At best, we can say it might be treason, but we cannot say with certainty. My own view is that it is not-- secession, and even rebellion, need not be treasonous. But I admit I could be wrong. You, too, could be wrong.
I’ve tried to find what legal experts have to say on the matter, but I haven’t found anything worth reporting. I’d be interested in reading anything that other posts might have access to. The best I found was a discussion on QUORA, which leaned heavily towards “not treason”.
You… just… said… my quotation of the US constitution was “opinion” then brought up a discussion on Quora?
Am I being whooshed??
OK. Did American citizens who renounced their American citizenship to fight for Nazi Germany in WWII commit treason? Were they traitors?
I guess all you guys would argue that no, because when then joined up with the Nazis they stopped being Americans.
So nobody can commit treason, it’s a logical impossibility I guess. So if there’s no such thing as treason, then of course Confederate soldiers couldn’t commit treason, it’s impossible for human beings to commit treason!
There is no quote from the constitution in what I quoted. There was your interpretation of what the constitution means, but there was not a quote from the constitution. Had I wanted to include the quotes from the constitution, I would have. But I didn’t.
I asked if you had any cites to back up your opinions. I notice you haven’t posted any.
And please don’t just post “the constitution” as a cite. Anyone worth debating with here knows that jurisprudence consists of a whole lot more than just some layman’s reading of the text of the constitution.
No, in the post you quoted, I quoted from the constitution. That’s the actual text of the constitution. Let me post that again for you, since you’re being deliberately obtuse:
.
If your contention with the quoted text calls into question the “shall vs will” argument, then you need only view the word after next: only. The intended meaning of shall in that context is clear to anyone with even a basic understanding of legal language. I may have been remiss in making that assumption, based on your dogged persistence in this regard.
Certainly most aspects of the constitution are complex. If we were discussing the merits of an implied right for individual citizens to bear arms, that’d be a discussion necessitating great care and deference to the many, many legal arguments that have followed from the technical wording employed in the second amendment.
This, however, is simple. You could bleat rather weakly that the CSA was somehow not an enemy of the USA, or that service to a foreign power belligerent against the USA did not somehow constitute aid and comfort or, you know, waging war against them, but you cannot contest the definition that is laid out in no uncertain terms.
The guys who planted a bomb in Hitler’s war bunker and nearly succeeded in killing the Fuhrer were also traitors. As were the Founding Fathers and all who fought to win our nation’s independence.
Isn’t it enough to refer to the Confederacy as secessionists who fought for an inhumane and morally unjust cause? Why the virtue signaling of slanted semantics?
Treason requires that you be a person who owes allegiance to the United States. The rebellion statute does not require this.
Treason requires that you levy war against the United States. The rebellion statute does not require this. Rebellion and insurrection are the disregard of lawful authority. They do not require the waging of war (armed conflict).
None of this is relevant to the question of the Civil War. It was always the legal position of the United States Government (even under Buchanan) that it was not possible for states to leave the Union. This legal position was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court in White v. Texas, an action to recover on some Confederate bonds, IIRC. Thus, those who, owing allegiance to the US (for example, Robert E. Lee), engaged in armed conflict with the US were guilty of treason. The fact that they wanted to believe they did not any longer owe that allegiance is irrelevant.
John Mace, surely you’ve read the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, no? Federal law is supreme over state law. That in itself means that no state is free to disregard federal law, and thus no state is free to secede. If the states didn’t like that, then they shouldn’t have ratified the Constitution in the first place.
Wait, is “secessionists” the new PC term for traitors, so we can assure some snowflakes that they won’t need a trigger warning for online discussions of the Civil War? We sure don’t want to commit any microaggressions on traito–err, SECESSIONISTS who have been dead for more than a century!
That would have been news to the Mexicans.
Sheer nonsense. The government of the United States continued to govern the majority of the pre-war population, continued to maintain itself in the federal district which had constituted the national capital for 60 years, and had institutional continuity with the existing federal government in every way.
That the Confederates were “traitors” seems undeniable, and is far from the worst thing about them, morally speaking. “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Hey, it’s only treason if you lose.
The moral issue isn’t that the Confederate wannabe Founding Fathers committed–horrors!–treason; it’s that they committed treason (and started a great big bloody war) for the express purpose of maintaining the institution of chattel slavery based on “race”.