On the recordJune 9, 2016
No. No. Due process can include habeas, but someone might say habeas corpus is the beginning of due process, not the end. Sometimes it occurs at the beginning, sometimes at the end, but regardless of when in the process it occurs, a habeas proceeding does not represent the sum total universe of what due process means. You can't read the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution to see that what happened in the version of NDAA that we passed in 2011 was an affront to the constitutional order. It was an aberration. We are not asking for anything drastic. All we are asking here is that before the government takes this step--the type of drastic step you are describing--that at minimum we require Congress to expressly authorize that. Is that really too much? For those who would say that we are at war, we are in danger--and I understand that. There are those who don't like our way of life. They even perhaps want to do us harm. For those who would say that we are at war and we have to take that into account and consider that, my response is, OK, if that is the case, then let's at least do it the way we are supposed to do it. Let's at least have that discussion rather than doing it by subterfuge, rather than doing it under a cloud of uncertainty, rather than doing it by implication. We need to do so expressly. That is all this amendment does.
