Sunday, October 19, 2008

posse comitatus

In the beginning the founding fathers felt it was wrong to have a standing army keeping the citizens in line as King George did. As we all know or should, from our history books, using an army to keep civil unrest down (or technically: laws from being broken) can lead to abuse of powers.
Later, during various times of our history and especially after the Civil War, there were supposed or "imagined" abuses of power by the army. So...we got the Posse Comitatus Law of 1876. A bit more about the history is here.

So, knowing the history do you think it's a good law or bad? Personally I think it's a great law, reflective of our founding father's thoughts on Democracy, and a law that makes our country stand out above many others that use their military to control their population (also known as Fascism).

Recently though, our rights have been eroded, yet again, by our standing President. Democracy Now!

Now that you know what's recently happened let's go back a little farther to 2001 after the September 11th attacks to where some of this first began in an article on Fox News.
Then on to Hurricane Katrina.

Abuse of power can happen even in the most simple sounding of cases.

This just goes to show why sometimes people are so against things that sound "good". In an unrelated post earlier this year (I feel overwhelmed) an anonymous commenter said not to get worked up because the article I quoted from was an alarmist/extremists position.
I don't know....I may be an alarmist sometimes or quote from alarmist articles, however history shows that positions of power can and will be abused often enough that we don't need to weaken our laws to accommodate them.

As soon as we get a new President...no matter which one it is....I have this Posse Comitatus jewel on my list to write in opposition to. (clarification added 10/20/08---I am going to write in opposition to the changes to Posse Comitatus, not the actual law. I realized when I re read my post that I was ambiguous as to what I was against. Sorry)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I share your feelings completely and I am so glad to hear someone else say so. Every time I try to discuss the changes to Posse comitatus with someone all I hear is the crickets chirp. I think the recent revelations on the eavesdropped telephone conversations of American citizens proves why many of us are against laws that sound good at the time but that we know will be abused.

Robbyn said...

Thank you for the PC link. I have no idea why Americans have not been furious at the post911 unprecedented bypassing of our constitutional rights. Unless they just don't care?????