“Anyone here know how many different federal agencies have it written into their charter that they have the power to suspend civil rights in times of national emergency?”
You’ve been watching too many X-Files episodes. The answer is: none of them.
The “charter” of any Federal agency is the statute that creates it, adopted openly by Congress and printed in the Statutes at Large and the U.S. Code for everyone to see. No Federal agency exists except as approved by Congress, NOT the President in some secret order locked away in some safe.
The Constitution has no clause about suspending civil rights in time of war or emergency, except for the suspension of the right of habeas corpus during rebellion and invasion (Article I, Section 9, paragraph 2).
The Supreme Court has found specifically that the Bill of Rights does not cease to apply, and cannot be suspended, because the United States is at war or otherwise in an emergency. Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866); Duncan v. Kahanamoku, 327 U.S. 304 (1946).
jayron: they were apparently quite serious about the game, but appear to have forgotten about it lately. They first announced the possibility 2-3 years ago, but I can’t find any links on it right now.
I believe the idea was to have the game shortly after the NFL Europe season ends and before the CFL season starts. Apparently professional sports teams can be on an equal footing at different points in a season. :rolleyes: At the time, they were still trying to work out under which rules the game would be played and I haven’t heard anything in the last year or so.
Actually, after the British regime came in, Quebec was full of Yanks, Scots, Brits, and others, besides the native francophone Canadians. It was a pretty mixed city, much more than nowadays.
tom, can you elaborate? I’m not sure what you mean.
This statement overlooks the francophone Acadians of PEI, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, who were there long before the British came along. (New Brunswick was part of Nova Scotia at the time of the American rebellion.) The Acadians weren’t all that happy with the Brits (see Evangeline by Longfellow), but neither were they all that keen on joining the rebellion, for reasons similar to the Québécois.
The Quebec Act gave political recognition to the powerful landowners and to the Catholic Church that had not been granted under the French Charter. It was intended as a pre-emptive appeasement of the Franco-phone population of Quebec, to prevent them considering joining the rebellious colonies to the south. (Independence was not much spoken of at that point, but general agitation and aggravation was a reality the Brits were trying to avoid.) The act also made French an official language of the region.
The power of the local inhabitants, enshrined in law according to their traditions, meant that there was little reason for the French speaking people to conform to British law, language, or custom. This had the effect of perpetuating a system of two cultures, living uneasily together. By (not very direct) comparison, Michigan was wholly French in 1763 and still primarily French at the time of the War for Independence with a strong French presence as late as the war of 1812. (As late as 1880, the French population of Detroit was large enough to continue building new schools where French was taught.) However, the French community was eventually overwhelmed by immigration. With no law to support their language or to enshrine their culture, they were simply assimilated over a period of 150 years.
I am not saying that French Quebec is a bad thing. It is, however, clearly an issue that has caused both British and Canadian governments a lot of grief over the years. The Quebecois independence movement is the most visible sign of that, but it is demonstrated in many small things, as well. For example, it has only been within the last 20 years (I don’t remember the date) that birth records in Quebec became a state function; previously they were maintained with the baptismal records at the local parishes.
Another aspect of legal conflict was the settlement of power on the large land-owners or seigneurs. They had nearly feudal rights over the administration of their lands and over the people who lived and worked on the land. Initially, the French culture helped this format of governance to work. The seigneurs while no more altruistic than anyone else, managed the land and the people, acknowledging certain reciprocal obligations derived from those priveleges. Later, as English/Scots/American landholders bought out some of the seigneurs who had fallen on hard times, they were more than willing to demand the privileges but were unaware of (or unconcerned with) the reciprocal obligations and they created a great deal of hard feelings among their tenants. The hard feelings, of course, translated into something along the lines of “those British bastards…” and further divided the cultures.
I was aware that Acadians lived on PEI (which they called Isle St. Jean), but they’d almost entirely been kicked out or emigrated by time of the American Revolution. See this page for a quick history. They were also largely (but not entirely) kick out of Nova Scotia by this time as well. In fact, a goodly number of them had been shipped to other English colonies such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. But Acadian history is rather complex and the page referenced above is part of a larger site detailing all their comings and going.
And my post implied this. NB was split off after the war when Loyalists settled the western parts of NS and then convinced the powers in London to give them a separate colony.
