[Peace-discuss] (no subject)

[Robert Naiman]

Laws stay on the books until they are repealed.

Caveat: funding prohibitions often expire with the appropriation that they
are attached to. If the form is, "no funding in this bill shall be used
to..." then that expires when the appropriation expires and has to be done
again the next year. Often there is a norm that those things are easily
continued into the next year, but not always.

The major challenge, of course, as you note, is to enforce the laws against
the powerful.

If we had enforced Article I of the Constitution and the War Powers
Resolution of 1973 during the Obama-Biden Administration, then the wars in
Libya, Syria, and Yemen wouldn't have happened. [We stopped the "uniformed"
part of the Syria war, but not the CIA part.]

This is the struggle we have been waging for the last three and a half
years on ending U.S. participation in the Saudi war in Yemen: to enforce
Article I of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973,
because U.S. participation in the war was *never authorized by Congress, **as
required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution*. [Also to
enforce the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits the export of U.S.
weapons to attack civilians.] This is what's *hanging fire right now* on
the Pentagon contractor funding bill [the "National Defense Authorization
Act."] That's what the House-passed Smith-Khanna-Schiff-Jayapal amendment
is all about: enforcing Article I of the Constitution and the War Powers
Resolution of 1973. That's why we're agitating with Jack Reed, Chuck
Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Eliot Engel, Adam Smith, and Adam Schiff to make
preserving the House-passed Smith-Khanna-Schiff-Jayapal amendment their *TOP
*priority in the House-Senate negotiations on the "veto proof" NDAA that's
sent to Trump.

Of course there are many other examples. Under the Foreign Assistance Act,
U.S. aid to the governments of Honduras and Egypt should have been cut off
after the military coups there. The Leahy Law could be applied to Israel.
To paraphrase the NRA: "We don't need to pass new laws to shut down the
U.S. Empire. We need to enforce the laws we already have."

See here:


*Good news from Bernie, Avaaz & the Chamber on ending the Saudi regime's
Yemen war!*
*https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/2/1883005/-Good-news-from-Bernie-Avaaz-the-Chamber-on-ending-the-Saudi-regime-s-Yemen-war
<https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/2/1883005/-Good-news-from-Bernie-Avaaz-the-Chamber-on-ending-the-Saudi-regime-s-Yemen-war>*

===

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1


On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 9:41 AM Mildred O'brien via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> I came across an interesting fact in the N-G's "International History On
> This Date" (August 31, 1935) blurb on Saturday that should
> concern anti-war/peace-makers:
>
>                        "President Franklin Roosevelt signed an act
> prohibiting the export of U.S. arms to belligerents."
>
> What is the duration of a Law?  Does legislation remain on the books until
> or unless repeal?  Of course the usual method  of violating law by
> opponents is to ignore it, as did Prescott Bush and others who profited
> from the Nazis, and the Reagan Administration when they defied (covertly)
> the Boland Amendments (1982 and 1984) prohibiting government funding of the
> Nicaraguan Contras.  Not until the plane carrying Eugene Hasenfus and CIA
> military supplies to the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua in 1986
> were Oliver North, the Reagan Administration, NSC and CIA exposed violating
> the Boland law.  Hasenfus was convicted of terrorism in Nicaragua
> and sentenced to 30 years in prison but was pardoned by President Ortega a
> month later on humanitarian appeal by his wife; North was tried and
> convicted in U.S. Court for Iran-Contra and sentenced to three years
> (suspended).
>
> We need binding laws to prohibit the export of U.S. arms today even more
> than in 1935!
>
> Midge
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20190903/c33e03dc/attachment.html>