One can hardly recall the Clinton years without becoming awash in a wave of exhaustion. For despite the rosy cast granted by the passage of time, it was in fact a time of immense loss of constant worry and social transformation, the effects of which are only dimly being perceived today. We must look at the error critically to see what was actually there, not to toss bouquets and incense over what was not. For in doing so, we can learn a bitter, unmistakable truth. Not all social transformation is a change for the better.And, when it came to the Clinton era, the political ascendancy of William Jefferson Clinton, Esquire, there was, to be sure, change, but hardly change for the better. And this was not by mistake, it was by design.
President Clinton ushered in the biggest change in habeas corpus since the Lincoln era, when in the throes of civil war the president suspended habeas corpus for those who aided and abetted the Southern Confederacy. Lincoln was rebuffed by the court, which held in the Milligan case that when the courts are open, the executive could not dispense with a writ. As we shall see, Clinton was far more subversive.
In the wake of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, Clinton pushed through what came to be called AEDPA for the Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act. It was hailed as a tool against terrorism and flew into law as the embers of Oklahoma was still warm. As with any law, it didn’t end with terrorism, but became a tool used in everyday non-terrorism-related cases, and especially in death penalty cases. It did what no habeas corpus law had ever done in the nearly seven hundred years since its British origins.
It exalted the findings of an inferior court, by that, I mean a lower court over that of an appellate, or higher in the American sense, federal court. The higher tribunal, composed of life-tenured judges nominated by the President and approved by a U.S. Senate majority, and made by the Constitution, were to defer to the reasoning of local, state, and elected judges, who often serve terms like any other politician. By this act, which on its face violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution, Clinton exalted the political over the judicial to the detriment and ultimate destruction of the historical and practical essence of the writ of habeas corpus; what legal scholars have called for over a century “the great writ. “
Today habeas corpus is an obstacle course one beset with trap doors and swinging axes, the result of which has fed the dreaded prison industrial complex by making it harder than ever to prove and prevail when a constitutional violation is made. We can’t assume that Mr. Clinton didn’t know what was going on, for Clinton was a law professor. He crafted a tool of mass repression that flipped habeas corpus on its head. This was politics, mass as law, to grant the state the power to close the door of the great writ and allow more convictions and longer prison terms, and expand state power.
Have you ever heard any politician say they would repeal AEDPA? Don’t hold your breath. Clinton, the author of DOMA, the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which was later declared unconstitutional, was also the author and signatory to AEDPA, which is just as unconstitutional. In the Constitution, Article Six is written, “The Constitution and the laws of the United States, which shall be made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land.” Clinton elevated elected state judges, and by so doing so violated the oath he took as a lawyer and as President of the United States. He left immense suffering as his legacy and gave rise to the prison house of nations. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
