Thread: Senate Bill Authorizes Feds To Revoke Citizenship Of Americans

Senate Bill Authorizes Feds To Revoke Citizenship Of Americans

January 16, 2012
By Doug Book
54 Comments

A bill has been introduced in the United States Senate which will authorize the federal government to revoke the citizenship, creating practical expatriates, of American citizens.

Introduced by Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman and Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, S 1698, the “Enemy Expatriation Act,” is a simple, 2 page document which offers apparently innocent amendments and additions to existing federal legislation. (1)

That legislation, known as Title 8, “…outlines the role of aliens and nationality in the U.S. Code.” And it is just one small piece of this massive and complex law which the Enemy Expatriation Act seeks to modify, that being Section 349, the means by which “a person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality…,” that is, his citizenship. (2)

Though there is currently little contained in Section 349 which would alarm any American citizen, one phrase added to the legislation by the “Enemy Expatriation Act” would change everything. For it states that anyone voluntarily “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States” will lose his “nationality.” And nationality means citizenship! (1)

To be sure, most of us would be in favor of revoking American citizenship if it has been improperly, perhaps surreptitiously attained by Muslim terrorists who have entered the United States only to commit acts of violence and murder.

But it’s necessary to remember who we are dealing with in Washington, DC. To Janet Napolitano and her Department of Homeland Security, it is Libertarians, soldiers returning from combat, gun owners, militia members, devout believers in the Constitution and those who loudly mistrust and criticize the federal government who are the true threats of “engaging in hostilities against the United States.” Perhaps not coincidentally it is also members of these groups who are the most vocal critics of the Obama Administration!

And as the Obama Regime considers each of these individuals a potential domestic terrorist, how long will it be until a member of one of these “highly suspect” groups is conveniently accused of “materially supporting hostilities against the United States?”

Much of this language should sound quite familiar, for it is taken directly from the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. There was great concern surrounding the authority given the President by this law to imprison American citizens without trial or charge if he should consider them enemies who present a danger to the United States and its people. And, just as the President is granted that authority by the NDAA, should the Enemy Expatriation Act pass both the House and Senate, he will ALSO have the authority to revoke their citizenship. (3)

Isn’t it odd that, no so long ago, the left was adamant about GRANTING to Muslim terrorists in Guantanamo the rights of American citizens—rights to a lawyer, Miranda rights of silence, and the right to a speedy trial before a jury! Yet with the signing into law of senate bill 1698, those same rights, indeed American citizenship itself, could be revoked from any one of “We the people!”

The election is only months away. Regardless who wins it, the “legal” destruction of our natural rights as citizens of the United States by Barack Hussein Obama or any other president must NOT be permitted.

Further reading:

http://www.asil.org/insights091020.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_8_of_the_United_States_Code
http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/terrorism/sjres23.es.html
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002385—-000-.html
http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_778.html
http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_781.html

Senate bill authorizes feds to revoke citizenship of Americans | Western Journalism.com

This bill needs to die. Kill the bill. Whatever good they were seeking is drastically over-shadowed by the bad that would fall upon US citizens under such a law.

Kill the bill, pass the FairTax, fix the US economy.

Sen. Carl Levin 'indefinitely detained' by activists





Chris Hedges and Two New York Attorneys
sue Obama over NDAA Martial Law Act

Survivalist.com

While outrage over the signing of NDAA continues, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, author and top human rights defender; Chris Hedges, and his attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran have filed a complaint against the President and Secretary of Defense; Leon Panetta in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City, challenging the legality of the authorization for use of military force in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Hedges explained his legal action Monday on Truthdig:

"[W]hile my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

"I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge," Hedges reported.

"I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have 'disappeared' into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation.


Hedges suspects NDAA passed because the corporations that really control this country are starting to worry that the Occupy movement will continue to grow and expand and they do not trust the police to protect them.

"They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can," Hedges said.

As for me, I see this as another step closer toward a fascist, Stasi police state. When the government turns on its own people and suspends individual rights, it can no longer be called a free country.

The NDAA goes into effect on March 3rd.

Read more here: Why I�m Suing Barack Obama

On the first day of the Occupy Congress protests, protesters
stormed the office of Sen. Carl Levin and held a mock arrest of
this treasonous public servant...

Video:

In Humor, Truth Sen. Carl Levin 'indefinitely detained' by activists

- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.

That's how we grow. Thanks.

Originally Posted by HAPPY2BME

If you see something say something!!!!! How about seeing all these fools destroying our constitution, does that count...Well I see this....CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW..

This person on the phone is as dumb as a rock...turn in Nappytano now

January 20, 2012 The Proposed Enemy Expatriation Act: Sending American Citizens into Exile

By Herbert W. Titus and William J. Olson
Sparked by the nation's so-called war on terrorism, the government has been charging full-throttle into another war -- a war on liberty. Drawing on its almost limitless technological arsenal, the government surreptitiously tracks and spies on our every movement, places under surveillance our internet and cell phone communications, and screens our bodies and personal effects.
Instead of standing for the people against these law enforcement abuses of our liberty, Congress has enacted laws such as the USA Patriot Act that undermine, rather than protect, the Bill of Rights. And to a large extent the American public are bystanders, watching this erosion, if not destruction, of American liberty, while being manipulated into believing that the loss of a few rights won't matter to them.

The destructive march against the constitutional ramparts securing our freedoms continued recently with the National Defense Authorization Act, wherein Congress has granted the president unchecked discretionary powers to detain indefinitely American citizens suspected of aiding acts of terrorism, without a warrant, jury trial or any other constitutional safeguards.

James Madison warned the people to be vigilant and take note of the first experiment with our liberties. But we have already allowed the government far beyond the first encroachment, with only minimal public outrage and opposition. The founders would be ashamed of the passivity of millions of "patriotic" Americans.

Things may now be going from very bad to even worse. This January, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Congressman Charles Dent (R-PA) introduced legislation to empower the federal government to dispossess citizens of their citizenship and send them into stateless exile. The fact that reliable weathervanes of the liberal House GOP establishment like Frank Wolf (R-VA) have co-sponsored this bill confirm that this bill is not an outlier.

Introduced as S. 1698 in the Senate and as H.R. 3166 in the House of Representatives, the Enemy Expatriation Act is expressly designed to "add engaging or supporting hostilities against the United States to the list of acts for which United States nationals would lose their nationality."

These bills are inconsistent with current law and Supreme Court precedent. They appear to be tailored to cow the American people, without regard for the 14^th-Amendment guarantee prohibiting Congress from divesting an American citizen of his citizenship.

On their face, S. 1698 and H.R. 3166 make it appear that any citizen "engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States" would lose his citizenship. This is unlike current law, which also requires proof that the citizen does so "with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality." Thus, the new bills would make it much easier for the government to strip a dissenting citizen of his citizenship.

Six of the seven expatriating acts in the current law require proof of formal actions -- either a direct renunciation of citizenship, or a similar act unmistakably demonstrating a change of allegiance to another country. These bills would require neither. Rather, they describe a newly minted offense, the commission of which may give rise to the inference of an intent to renounce citizenship, but without requiring any direct evidence of such an intent.

To be sure, current law provides that the commission of treason or other serious acts may justify an inference of renunciation of citizenship. However, before such an inference can be made, the person previously must have been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of one or more specified criminal acts. Under the proposed bills, the government could take away a person's citizenship in a civil action without that person having been previously convicted of a crime in a court governed by traditional procedural safeguards of trial by jury, confrontation of witnesses, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under the new bills, the government would be required only to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that a person "engag[ed] in, or purposefully and materially support[ed] hostilities against the United States" with the intent of relinquishing his citizenship. Further, "hostilities" is defined as "any conflict subject to the laws of war" -- as if this definition narrowed the grounds upon which a person could be deprived of citizenship. The American people are constantly being reminded that the nation is at war against terrorism, albeit undeclared by Congress, and against an as-yet-to-be-defined enemy. Anyone voicing opposition to the war in Afghanistan, or contributing to an Islamic charitable organization, is thus in jeopardy of being charged with committing the expatriating act set forth in these two bills.

At the height of the Cold War, the Supreme Court rashly decided Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1957), which held that "Congress has the constitutional authority forcibly to take away a person's citizenship, regardless of his intention not to give it up." However, a decade later in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 254 (1967), the Court corrected its error, holding that United States citizenship, once vested by birth or naturalization, may not be "take[n] away ... without [the citizen's] assent: 'In our country, the people are sovereign and Government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship'" (Afroyim at 257).

This remains the law of the land. As a unanimous Court ruled in 1980, "[i]n the final analysis, expatriation depends upon the will of the citizen rather than on the will of Congress and its assessment of his conduct" (Vance v. Terrazas, 444 U.S. 252, 260).

Unfortunately, the Court ruled in that same case that the Constitution required the government to prove by only a "preponderance of the evidence," a standard of proof acceptable in civil cases. But charging an American with committing an act with the intention of relinquishing one's citizenship is not an ordinary civil matter. Rather, as dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out, "[an] expatriate has lost his right to have rights. This punishment is offensive to cardinal principles for which the Constitution stands[.] ... He may be subject to banishment, a fate universally decried by civilized people. He is stateless, a condition deplored in the international community of democracies" (Terrazas, 444 U.S. at 271).

Justice Marshall was right. Expatriation is not just a civil matter; it is a serious criminal punishment. Any American citizen charged with having voluntarily renounced his citizenship should be entitled to all the criminal procedures secured by the Bill of Rights. Nothing less will satisfy due process of law. S. 1698 and H.R. 3166 move the nation in just the opposite direction, adding more uncertainty where more precision is needed. If American citizenship is to be protected against involuntary forfeiture, government officials must be reminded that in America, the People, not the government, are sovereign.

Herb Titus taught constitutional law for 26 years, concluding his academic career as founding dean of Regent Law School. Bill Olson served in three positions in the Reagan administration. They now practice constitutional law together, defending against government excess, at William J. Olson, P.C. They can be reached at wjo@mindspring.com or Olsonlaw@twitter.com.


Articles: The Proposed Enemy Expatriation Act: Sending American Citizens into Exile