SENATOR MORGAN, ALABAMA.
This, Mr. President, is to all intents and purposes an ex post facto law. If I have rightly constructed the language in which the seventh section is couched, it undertakes to create a crime and punish a man for the commission of it at a time before the statute itself was enacted, certainly before this method of punishment is prescribed; and if I understand anything in reference to constitutional law, it is that you cannot impose a new punishment upon one who has been guilty even of a crime against the law, so as to make it retroactive in its effect and in its operation.
Now we have the entire case under the Constitution. I submit to the honorable committee and to the Senate that this bill is amenable to two constitutional objections in the particulars I have named. First, it is an ex post facto law, punishing men for crimes heretofore committed, and to which the punishment now sought to be annexed was not annexed at the time of their commission. The next is that it is a bill of attainder, a bill of pains and penalties, whereby the legislative department of the Government usurps the functions of the judicial, and puts a man under condemnation without trial and without even the due observance of the forms of law. As the act stands on its face, and as the purposes of it are entirely apparent from its whole tenor, I think there could not be a more flagrant violation of the Constitution.