Is due process great? Is it still an American value?
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President Trump is deporting thousands and thousands of people.
Bureaucrats working for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) accuse these people of breaking laws, either immigration laws or otherwise. The next step is...
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...a trial where a prosecutor and a defense attorney test evidence in front of a jury using time-tested rules of procedure.
Traditionally, Americans called this due process.
Now, bureaucrats call it unnecessary.
The bureaucratic opinion rules in this case.
How did this happen?
How did due process become unAmerican?
It happened from four points of constitutional failure...
First
For decades, Congress delegated the power to legislate to Executive Branch agencies.
Second
Congress also usurped the judicial power and conferred it on the same Executive Branch agencies, making them not only the police who arrest people, but also the judges who sentence them.
Administrative agencies do this through Administrative Courts. The old-fashioned courts are called Article 1 courts because they are the courts created by the Constitution. Administrative Courts are nowhere permitted in the Constitution, yet they exist.
Third
Presidents rarely veto legislation that delegates legislative and judicial power to the Executive Branch. They love having that power.
Fourth
The Supreme Court has rubber-stamped these unconstitutional delegations of power under the idea that "democracy" requires them to let elected representatives do what they want.
How do we make American due process great again?
Several recent Supreme Court rulings have curtailed congressional delegation of legislative power to the Executive Branch. We have submitted amicus curiae briefs in many of these cases, but…
More remains to be done.
We have also created and promoted the Write the Laws Act to do the rest of this job. It has been introduced in Congress. If Congress cannot delegate the power to legislate, then there will be no foundation on which to erect Administrative Courts. But also...
American due process is threatened in the Judicial Branch
A notable example is the judge-created doctrine of legal findings. That power was neither passed by Congress nor signed by the President.
Judges impose long sentences based on evidence that was never tested in court, and upon which no jury rendered a verdict.
The Ross Ulbricht case was an example of this. The Judge sentenced Ross to life in prison with no possibility of parole, based on evidence that the jury never heard and that the defense was never allowed to challenge.
Fortunately, President Trump recently corrected this injustice by pardoning Ulbricht. But...
Who will correct all the other cases? We will and you can, by joining The 300 to outlaw sentences based on judicial findings.
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Set your own agenda,
Jim Babka, President
Agenda Setters by Downsize DC
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