need for speed

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails//fileid/32118/9171

#3197997

Judge Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion, was, if anything, even more remarkable in this regard. “Put simply,” he wrote—as if it were the most uncontested idea in the world—“the military commission trial of the Lincoln conspirators is the highest-profile and most important U.S. military commission precedent in American history.” It “looms as an especially clear and significant precedent,” and therefore Congress in 1916 (and again in 1950, when it re-enacted the statute) “necessarily incorporated the Lincoln assassins precedent [for military commission jurisdiction over conspiracy charges].”

Just like that, the Lincoln assassination trial has gone from being part of the anti-canon to being a “landmark” precedent—indeed, the “most important” military commissions precedent in the nation’s history!

speed

>>3199152

>>3199661

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails//fileid/32118/9171

The question, in a nutshell, is this: Can Congress, consistent with Article III (and the Sixth Amendment) authorize military tribunals to try violations of domestic law in a time of war, when the conduct in question is designed to advance the enemy’s cause? That describes, in fact, what actually happened in the Lincoln case, as well as in Quirin. Yet no court, and no Attorney General, has ever decided it.

As Judge Kavanaugh explained, if the answer to that question is “no”—if Congress cannot provide for prosecution of such cases in a military tribunal—that would, as a practical matter, be a result impossible to reconcile “with the Lincoln conspirators and Nazi saboteurs conspiracy convictions, and it cannot be squared with Quirin.” That is to say, it would mean that those trials transgressed constitutional limits.

In large measure because of such an implication, Judge Kavanaugh himself would hold that those historical precedents—and the logic of the Court in Quirin, which was based upon colonial-era practices and which actually reflected one of the constitutional arguments proffered by John Bingham in his role as assistant prosecutor of the Lincoln commission—resolve the question in favor of Congress’s power. Whether Judge Kavanaugh is correct about that or not, surely it is now a question of enormous significance . . . and the governing law, such as it is, does not resolve it.