Voices For American
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Voices For American Direct Democracy |
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Killing Rights -- Anti-Abortion Legislative Felony
© 2006 by Stephen Neitzke -- stephen
@ddleague-usa.net
The South Dakota legislature handed anti-abortion extremists a great howler of a victory on Monday, 06 March 2006, when Governor Mike Rounds signed the anti-abortion bill, HB 1215, the "Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act".
The subsequent media feeding frenzy has included whatever politics of abortion can be marginalized inside the box of the status quo. Mustn't threaten money-power or the extremists with real consequences for their unconstitutional, illegal, and treasonous actions.
Across the country, media defense of constitutional rights has gone dark. No lights on. Almost nobody home. Almost nobody to say, wait just one damn minute. Lawful rights trump unlawful values. Marginalize this.
HB 1215 might be about overturning Roe v. Wade somewhere down the road, but it's about killing established rights first.
The decision in Roe v. Wade recognized a woman's abortion decision to be a part of personal privacy rights. Personal privacy is a core human and citizen right derived from and guaranteed by many provisions in the Constitution, regardless of the fact that the word, 'privacy', is not mentioned in the Constitution. Per Roe, the abortion decision right is not open to challenge by state action for the first trimester of pregnancy. It is not overshadowed by important state considerations -- the woman's health and protection of potential life -- until the fetus has life-sustaining viability, usually from 24 to 28 weeks after fertilization. The moment that life begins is not an issue. While the woman's personal privacy is her own -- prior to fetus viability -- and not yet shared with the fetus, the state has no compelling interests and the abortion decision remains the woman's personal privacy right.
Some of the details of Roe might be eventually altered, or the decision might be wholly overturned, but those possibilities are off in the future. They are not the immediate effect of HB1215. The immediate effect is the violation of Constitutional rights through an unconstitutional statute that is not law, but rather an anti-law regime. If Roe is to be changed, some route other than state statutes that violate the woman's Constitutional, personal privacy right to the abortion decision will have to be found. No federal court, including the Supremes, can treat an unconstitutional anti-law regime as a legitimate basis for a binding judicial review of a constitutional right.
The unconstitutional realities of South Dakota's HB 1215 are the violation of established Constitutional rights, the setting of an unconstitutional anti-law regime, the creation of a federal conspiracy felony against the nation, and the highly probable treason of the assenting South Dakota legislators and governor.
HB 1215 is about all of those things. Worst of all, it's about a state-level governing elite perpetrating a federal conspiracy felony against rights and trying to hide the felony behind the doctrine of legislative immunity.
The enactors of HB 1215 want you to assume that they have a blanket legislative immunity that protects their legislative acts from judicial scrutiny in any criminal prosecution or civil lawsuit. They want you to assume that their blanket legislative immunity means that they are not culpable for any illegal consequences of their lawmaking. Absent treason, felony, or breach of peace -- and assuming lawmaking done within a constitutional framework -- those things about legislative immunity would be true.
Surprise, Article 3, paragraph 11 of the South Dakota constitution says that legislative immunity shall not extend to cases of "treason, felony, or breach of peace". If you do the felony, Mr. Legislator, you can be taken from this place, questioned, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned -- while you are still an elected public official.
Surprise, every conspiracy that violates a Constitutional right is a federal felony, as defined in the federal statute, 18 USC 241. That short, powerful law says, in part -- "If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, ... They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both... ".
Surprise, the SCOTUS decision in United States v. Gillock, 445 U.S. 360 (1980), clearly established that the doctrine of legislative immunity does not shield the legislative acts of a state legislator from criminal prosecution in a federal court. "The historical antecedents and policy considerations which inspired the Speech or Debate Clause of the Federal Constitution do not require recognition of a comparable evidentiary privilege for state legislators in federal prosecutions. ... Where important federal interests are at stake, as in the enforcement of federal criminal statutes, principles of comity must yield. Recognition of an evidentiary privilege for state legislators for their legislative acts would impair the legitimate interest of the Federal Government in enforcing its criminal statutes with only speculative benefits to the state legislative process."
The moment that the governor of South Dakota signed HB 1215, he and every legislator who voted for the legislation became co-conspirators in the federal conspiracy felony to violate rights. They are all constitutional criminals and felons-in-waiting. Their only rightful place is in federal prison.
High station in life is not a get-out-of-felony-free card. Federal prosecutions of the South Dakota felons-in-waiting should have begun immediately.
The prima facie case against the enactors of HB 1215 does not stop with their felonious violation of Constitutional rights. In violation of their oaths to uphold the state and national constitutions, they have failed to protect the rights of South Dakotans and flagrantly violated both constitutions with their legislative felony. Those are acts of treason on a parallel with the findings of treason for the 1860s secessionists.
And still the prima facie case is not ended. The enactors of HB 1215 intend that their unconstitutional anti-law regime be enforced 'under color of law'. The entire machinery of the South Dakota government will be involved in that unconstitutional enforcement. Every episode of enforcement will be its own federal conspiracy felony against rights, actionable in a criminal prosecution in federal court under 18 USC 241. Every episode of enforcement will be, separately, its own deprivation of rights, as defined in 42 USC 1983, actionable in a civil lawsuit in federal court. Every enforcement episode with criminalize law enforcement officers and officials, city and state attornies, consitutional officers, and judges. And every one of them will be probable defendants in federal civil lawsuits.
Those consequences of enforcement are not some wowsy-dowsy surprise blowback. They're not unknown, unexpected, or unintended consequences. The enactors of HB 1215 can be held responsible for knowing exactly that the enforcement of their unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous statute would yield those unconscionable consequences.
It's the law, stupid -- not the politics.
HB 1215 might reflect the genuine and heart-felt political values of the majority of the criminal government of South Dakota. It might be supported by tens of thousands of dangerous South Dakotan extremists. But it is still unconstitutional, felonious, and probably treasonous in the law. Compared to its illegalities, its political noise is insignificant.
In many ways, at many levels, HB 1215 profits corrupt government by keeping we the sovereign people emotionally divided against ourselves. The less unity there is among the people, the less the state and national governments have to worry about having their corruptions and criminalities rigorously examined. HB 1215 is proof of the disunity benefit to the criminal South Dakota government. There is not a breath of legal retribution for the South Dakota felony in the corporately-controlled media. There is not a hint of grand jury or indictment activity against the criminal enactors of HB 1215 at the US Attorney's office in Pierre, South Dakota -- where the indictment should be brought in federal court.
Without threats of legal retribution, the bigoted, anti-abortion, anti-rights governments of many other states will follow South Dakota's criminal lead.
Every state constitution carries the felony exception to legislative immunity. In the language of most state constitutions, legislative immunity is couched in the "privileges" or "immunities" in whatever Article defines the legislative branch. You can find the felony exception for other states whose governments have already announced South-Dakota-like anti-abortion intentions at the following citations -- Mississippi (Article 4, section 48), Missouri (Article 3, section 19), Ohio (Article 2, section 12), Indiana (Article 4, section 8), Tennessee (Article 2, section 13), West Virginia (Article 6, section 16), Kentucky (Section 43).
This unconscionable tactic of overturning Constitutional rights with unconstitutional statutes has been used too frequently at both the state and the national levels for over 100 years. Its state and national use has become blatant under the Bush-Cheney despotism, witness the USA Nazi Patriot Act. We cannot afford to sit and wait for what money-power's Republifascists -- and their co-fascist wing of Demofascists -- will surely do to other of our rights, freedoms, and liberties with this tactic. We the sovereign people need a cerebral unity on citizen rights, regardless of our emotional divisions. We need to get our friends together and force the criminal prosecutions of every federal conspiracy felony against citizen rights, no matter how many elected public officials are co-conspirators. Question One -- Why has the US Attorney for the District of South Dakota, Steven K. Mullins, not brought a conspiracy felony indictment of the HB 1215 co-conspirators in federal court? Is this another case of Republican party cronyism from the Bush Illegitimacy's federal OJD -- Obstruction of Justice Department?
Mullins' web site is at -- http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/sd Send your snail-mail cards and letters to Mullins at PO Box 7240, Pierre, SD 57501. Indifference to rights is the death knell of sovereign peoples that began ringing in ancient Republican Rome. Indifference to rights is a nation-killer. Do something. Start now, please.
Comments? Please Email
Stephen Neitzke, DDL Founder
stephen@ddleague-usa.net
Dura lex, sed lex.
Common
Ground
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Page last revised Fri 06 Jul 2007
