xxJustice Quote

Supreme Court recently ruled, “the First Amendment protects against the Government; it does not leave us at the mercy of noblesse oblige.” United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S., 130 S.Ct. 1577, 1591 (2010). As Chief Justice Roberts observed: “The Government’s assurance that it will apply [a statutory provision] more restrictively than its language provides is pertinent only as an implicit acknowledgment of the potential constitutional problems with a more natural reading.” Id In Federalist No. 43, James Madison explained that the Treason Clause was one of the enumerated powers of the federal government. 21 By defining treason in the Constitution and placing it in Article III, the founders intended the power to be checked by the judiciary, ruling out trial by military commission. As Madison noted, the Treason Clause also was designed to limit the power of the federal government to punish its citizens for “adhering to [the United States’s] enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” In such cases, Madison warned: [N]ew-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other. [Id. (emphasis added).] Therefore, Madison concluded, the Constitutional Convention: with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author. [Id. (emphasis added).] As Joseph Story observed, there is very good reason that treason’s “true nature and limits should be exactly ascertained:” [A] charge of this nature, made against an individual, is deemed so opprobrious, that, whether just or unjust, it subjects him to suspicion and hatred; and, in the times of high political excitement, acts of a very subordinate nature are often, by popular prejudices ... magnified into this ruinous importance. [2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, § 1797, p. 577 (5 th ed., Little, Brown: 1891) (emphasis added).]

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