continuing about the Constitution Restoration Act

[novapsyche]

I'm not the best at reading legalese, but here's the meat of the matter:

In interpreting and applying the Constitution of the United States, a court of the United States may not rely upon any constitution, law, administrative rule, Executive order, directive, policy, judicial decision, or any other action of any foreign state or international organization or agency, other than English constitutional and common law up to the time of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States.

Well, that's at least some of the meat.

Would this mean that all case law after the Constitution was ratified would be useless?

(the text of the bill)

Oh, and of the authors of this bill, I've heard of Brownback, who was recently mentioned on dailykos as a potential GOP candidate in 2008. Dailykos says he's as rightwing as they come.

Comments

[kali-ma.livejournal.com]

At a surface glance, it would appear so. Whic is ridiculous. Clearly they intend to try to hamper judges perceptions of law interpretation to only consider American law (as many are incensed over justices pointing out in their decisions that, for example, the US was one of the only countries to practice the execution of people for crimes they committed while they were minors and that perhaps this showed we were clinging to barbarism maybe just a little bit), but even so - that is very poorly worded.

[mr-quackenbush.livejournal.com]

it doesn't change anything. US Courts don't cite foreign law except in cases where there is a gray area and it gets cited in support of a "general consensus among free nations." there was a pretty good article about the whole issue in Harpers, i think, last year.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I missed one of the key words there. Okay.

[vaxjedi]

I think the interesting bit is talking about impeachment of the judiciary. it seems to say, as far as I can tell, if a judge makes a judgement on whether an agency can acknowledge God as a source of Law, they are outside of their jurisdiction and vulnerable to impeachment. Essentially "enforce seperation of church and state (if that church is monotheistic and calls its deity God) and become a target".

[davehogg.livejournal.com]

Actually, that seems to be the sane part of the bill. I don't think they use foreign case law very often anyway.

I'm more alarmed by the part that says the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over government officials claiming that God is the "sovereign source of law, liberty, or government", and then saying that, if they claim jurisdiction, they can be impeached.