I’ve read recently in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that one of Tronald’s minions, Kris Kobach of Kansas, is proposing a Muslim Registration Act. As everyone who’s familiar with the X-Men as a franchise knows, periodically some idiot in Congress (typically Senator Robert Kelly, from NY in the comics and KS in the movies) proposes a Mutant Registration Act. And of course everyone even passably familiar with the Marvel Comics Universe knows about the idiocy of the original Superhuman Civil War and the overly broad Super Human Registration Act that provoked it. I believe that such laws are inherently illegal.
Why do I say that? Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution prohibits the Congress from doing certain things. One of them is a prohibition on Bills of Attainder. What is a bill of attainder? It’s a law that (paraphrasing from Wikipedia) says that merely being a particular person, or a member of a particular group of people is in and of itself a crime.
Mass forced registrations of groups of people by race, religion, or anything else just for existing operate, I think, on the assumption that these people are, just for being them, destined to be more criminal than others. That’s not science, that’s quackery. It’s the same quackery behind bad policing such as “stop-and-frisk” or even treating “driving while black” as a crime.
Treating some people as criminals just for existing is also a violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment. Everyone assumes that due process includes the presumption of innocence before guilt is proven. If some people are presumed guilty while others aren’t because of their race, or religion, or some other factor, then equal protection is obviously denied.
I think that maintaining registries of actual convicted terrorists might be useful. That means the feds should be held to account—as in prosecuted for dereliction of duty equivalent to or greater than first degree murder—for not observing due process. Gitmo and other, more secret, prisons, should be closed and due process must be observed.
As I have a functional conscience, I am opposed to the use of torture on 8th Amendment grounds. Also, we’re a signatory power of the Geneva Conventions, and the consequences on their violators really should be dire. Violation of these laws should be equivalent to first degree murder, if not treason. If it’s clearly contrary to the Constitution, and to the international laws and policies we have incorporated into it through treaty ratification, then it should be seen as that dire a crime, and no less.
Again, I’m not an expert in the law or a practicing lawyer. This is my layman’s opinion, and my layman’s opinion only.