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.