I believe that Lincoln acted completely on his on in starting the war and in suspending habeus corpus. He involved Congress only some months after the fact.

If I recall correctly, Lincoln had a ruling made against him by the Supreme Court regarding Habeus Corpus.

He ignored the Supreme Court.

Actually, it seems to me that the president does have unlimited power if he has the gall to seize it. A president could hire people to kill off the supreme court and enough members of one house of congress to make it impossible to assemble a quorum, making impeachment impossible, and also pardon the hired killers. He could then refuse to nominate any judges not firmly in his pocket, possibly even in his immediate family. Sovereign immunity would prevent him from being tried without first being impeached, and without a quorum in both houses he could not be impeached.

This is one of the reasons I don't approve of the power to grant pardons.

CCR: Are you forgetting the right of armed revolt granted in the Second Amendment? The people themselves can remove a sitting President, his staff, Congress, and the Supreme Court, all at once if the will-power is there, without suspending even one dot of the Constitution.

"The second amendment is for when they forget about all of the other ones"

>I believe that Lincoln acted completely on his on in
>starting the war
Ripper, Are you suggesting that it was US Navy guns firing on Ft. Sumpter? The south started the war, not Lincoln. Back to the history books for you.

You are correct. The South did fire the first shots of the Civil War. The question is,"Why did the South fire those first shots?" Who practically forced the South to fire those first shots at Ft. Sumpter?

You infer that the previous writer does not know his history. Search your history a tad more. You will quickly discover how much you lack in the realm of history.

Good Day and Much Luck

Eugene,

No one forces people to pull the trigger of their weapons unless literally they are doing that.

In the case of Ft. Sumpter it was the South that by their Free Will chose to fire the shots and start the civil war.

In effect.... The Federal Government can do whatever the heck it wants to parts of its own country and it isn't starting a war unless they are literally shooting people with their military.

Just as the first civil war did not start until the first shots were made.... You can't say the fact that the Boston Tea Party occured was the start of the war.

Sorry for sending this thread off into a discussion of who/what started the Civil War with my poor choice of the word 'start'. Yes, I learned about the shots fired on Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor in 1861. What I meant to say was that Lincoln escalated into a full war (after the South 'started' it with shots) without any Congressional involvement whatsoever.

The thread speaks to presidents taking on special powers, and my comment was intended to say that Lincoln took on a lot of special powers without Congressional involvement (or support). I think most other presidents faced with wartime circumstances have acted in a similar way.

The implication of the opening words for this thread were that all presidents except the current one had not done things except with congressional backing.

Not to mention FDR, whose wartime administration abused civil rights in this country unseen since ... Woodrow Wilson's administration. Together, those two Democrat wartime administrations actually abused civil rights in ways Michael Moore's delusional mind can't even imagine.

Roundups of races, suppression of the press, jailing anti-war opinion. Military tribunals ordering death sentences of US citizens on US soil ...

Its a very silly claim above.

"Not to mention FDR, whose wartime administration abused civil rights in this country unseen since …"

Back to the history books for you. FDR acted with congressional approval, and full republican support on that one.

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