I wonder, though, could this be considered an unconstitutional bill of attainder? That's an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of people, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, without a trial. Article I, Section 9, iii: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed".
A bill of attainder is an act of a legislature declaring a particular person guilty of a crime and prescribing criminal punishment; they aren't the same thing as this, which is (in effect of not in name) a private bill, which are well established as Constitutional.
It's not. A bill of attainder declares a specific person guilty for past actions and punishing them - thereby denying them the right to a judicial trial.
While this bill does refer to a specific organization, it doesn't punish them for past actions, but rather constrains future ones. That is perfectly ok as shown in cases like Huawei v. United States or Kaspersky Lab, Inc. v. DHS. Like Kaspersky, it's "prophylactic, not punitive."
I too have little faith, but I still believe this is the time for trying.
I don't mean "bill of attainder", I mean specific penalties for officials that do not follow the law. I didn't think that fit under "bill of attainder". I'm not talking about no trial, but no sovereign immunity from prosecution in failure of duty. I could be wrong at how that works since it isn't my area.
I don't know how the law works. But my completely-unfounded guess is that whoever is supposed to authorize this and who is refusing would be the one convicted.
It generally would be considered unconstitutional, yes. When immigration status is thrown into the mix though, you never really know what can happen unfortunately. 10 years without trial is in fact a whole lot too long though!!
While I see that as a valid issue in it's own right... I don't see the connection here, sorry.
Cruel and unusual punishment applies regardless of actual or claimed innocence, they could have totally done the crime and the punishment could still be unconstitutional.
This is not a catch-22 side effect of inflexible poorly written law, but an intentional side-stepping of built-in protections against abuse of power.
I think there is a very rationale case to be made that imprisonment for the sake of punishment is unproductive and immoral - but I can't see any way that it falls under unconstitutional.
Contrarily I would expect a clause prohibiting unconstitutional laws in pretty much every single constitution ever written.
As you say however, constitutions rarely define crimes, and so making the passing of unconstitutional laws a crime would be an unexpected outlier. This is not however what I am talking about.
In passing a law that knowingly violates the constitution, the politicians are acting to _enable_ crimes, or rather, actions considered crimes under existing legislation. This action takes place before the new (later to be hopefully struck down) law is passed, and should be considered a criminal act.
As far as knowing what they are doing affecting their conviction or punishment, I fully agree that not understanding that their actions will lead to "necessarily criminal" consequences, should be considered a mitigating factor.
I don’t think this is true; it’s not a criminal statute. While the law is problematic for plenty of reasons, the threat of imprisonment is not one of them.
Taking an official action that is then ruled unconstitutional is typically not a criminal violation, though sometimes a criminal statute is enacted to further protect constitutional rights (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 243 makes it a federal crime to exclude jurors on the basis of race or color).
Again, ‘it depends’. You’re generally correct, but ‘bills of attainders’ laws (aka targeting specific individuals) along with the ‘equal protection before the law’ clauses make it unconstitutional, and that is the general theory behind it not being ok to do true selective enforcement (aka Bob gets charged for something Joe does openly all the time).
Like pointed out in a sibling thread though, essentially impossible to prove, let alone get anyone to care about, and useless as a defense unless someone is being stupidly blatant about it.
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