The Terrorist Expatriation Act, co-sponsored by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of people who provide support to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or who attack the United States or its allies.
First thought - ok, this seems somewhat reasonable. You lose your citizenship if you join another country's army (except, oddly, the Israeli Defense Force) so it makes sense that you'd lose your citizenship if you've taken up arms against the US as part of a terrorist organization.
Then I read this part:
The lawmakers said at a news conference that revoking citizenship would block terrorism suspects from using American passports to re-enter the United States and make them eligible for prosecution before a military commission instead of a civilian court.
Whoah, big difference. Stripping citizenship from people who've been convicted in a court of law of aiding terrorists, ok, I can get behind that. But just suspects? Many many problems with that:
Who decides which suspects get their citizenship stripped? Is it anybody who's "suspected" of terrorism? What if Obama told the State Department that he suspected Scott Brown was a terrorist... is Brown's citizenship gone? This is ridiculously unconstitutional - people have due process rights precisely because we don't trust the executive branch (even if we like the guy currently occupying the office) to just be able to punish people on the basis of suspicion
We have repeatedly gotten the "wrong guys" in terrorism arrests. It's easy to get the right guy when you're arresting the underpants bomber on the plane, but it's a much different thing if you're going after supporters who weren't caught red-handed. For example, according to whitepages.com, there are 151 in New York City alone who share the name "Khalid Mohammed" with the 9/11 plotter. It would suck to be one of them and have gotten swept up by the police when intelligence chatter indicated that a Khalid Mohammed was involved... and then have your citizenship stripped because you're now a suspect.
Just this week, journalists mixed up the Facebook profiles of Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad with another Faisal Shahzad, focusing national attention on the innocent Faisal. This is another reason that, before the government takes harsh actions like removing somebody's citizenship, you have the full protection and inquiry of a trial to make sure that the government proves, beyond reasonable doubt, that suspect is in fact guilty of the crime charged.
This wouldn't even help terrorism prosecutions or intelligence collecting. If we've caught a terrorism suspect, he's locked up - he's not using an American passport to go anywhere. Moreover, even if a suspect's citizenship was stripped, the bill of rights generally applies to anybody in the US - citizen or not (that's why, for instance, even undocumented immigrants get provided a lawyer at trial - because the Constitution still applies to them). It's not at all clear that stripping citizenship would be anything more than a punitive measure.
In this country, we have due process for people suspected of comitting crimes because, now and again, the suspect is not in fact the person who committed the crime. Lieberman and Brown, and many other folks, in fear of terrorist attacks, are forgetting this - terrorism suspects are not always terrorists. The reason we have trials and such is to separate out the innocent from the actual terrorists.
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