| The first one is the risible plan by Sen. Joe Lieberman (Putz- CT) to allow the State Department to determine if you are associated with a terrorist group. They could provisionally strip you of your citizenship. You could challenge it in court, but only after the fact, not before the decision was made.
I think the idea is to make it easier to prosecute you in a military tribunal, or to keep you from having all the habeas right you might deserve as a citizen. On a side note it would also uncomplicated things if you were a citizen and we wanted to use a Predator or Reaper drone strike to assassinate you overseas.
This flies in the face of the idea of due process. A government agency can decide without you having a chance to challenge the evidence or confront your accusers that your association with a terror group severs your citizenship. There is no trial beforehand; you do not get to offer a defense. There is a fig leaf provision that puts the burden of proof on the State Department if you challenge it in court, but until you prevail there, you are not a citizen of the United States.
Given what we have seen with past treatment of citizens who have been declared enemy combatants this should be very worrying. At the very least these people were put in this status by direct order of the President, not one of the Departments below him. This might seem like a small distinction but the State Department is a huge agency where there are many people who are completely unknown to the citizens of our country, whereas the President is a single person and, to some level, accountable to the people. Moving this kind of power (which even the President should not have) inside an agency like State is a sure route to less accountability. When we are even considering stripping citizenship, we should be looking for more not less accountability.
The problem with this proposal is really the lack of due process under the law. No major ban on a citizen should be imposed without due process. To do so endangers all of our rights in two ways. First off the process can be politicized and used to embarrass someone, even if they eventually get their citizenship back.
The second one is even more worrisome; the tacit acceptance that your citizenship is contingent on your behavior. This opens a Pandora's Box of potential follow on triggers that could end your rights as a U.S. citizen. Given the hysteria we see in some of our fellow citizens we can not take the chance of giving a tool that would allow the tyranny of the majority to pick and choose who is a citizen and who is not.
The other proposal we will be seeing is an attempt to close the so-called "terror gap". Sen. Frank Lautenberg (Scaredycat-NJ) and Rep. Peter King (Jackass NY) have introduced legislation that would allow the FBI to deny the sale of guns or explosives to anyone on the nofly list.
The thinking from the two elected officials is that if you are a bad person who is on the no-fly list or the Terrorist Watch list, then you should not be allowed to buy weapons. That seems reasonable on the face of it, after all we don't want bad people to have access to weapons. The problem is that pesky Constitution and due process again.
The no-fly list has 400,000 names on it currently. To get on the list you just have to have someone, somewhere in government law enforcement put your name on it. That's it. No judicial review, no notice of your denial and no set process to appeal. We have seen people as high profile as the late Sen. Edward Kennedy on the list as well as numerous soldiers and private citizens, even little kids. It is just a list of names, so if you are unlucky enough to have the same name as someone on the list, well you're on it too.
The argument Rep. King and Sen. Lautenberg are making is that we don't want terrorists to be able to buy weapons. Fair enough, but the what they are trying to do is prevent people suspected of being terrorists from buying weapons. You can be suspected of a lot of things in this country, but we don't sanction you if you have not been found, by a court, to actually have committed the act.
This goes to the same kind of hysteria behind Sen. Lieberman's citizenship stripping law. The fear of a terrorist attack is leading legislators to shred the protections that citizens have against guilt by association and due process. All this might seem, to them, like it would make us safer from losers like Faisal Shahzad but the reality is it put us in greater danger from abuse by our government.
I tend to laugh at the folks who claim that the government is going to come for their guns and that there are huge interment camps being set up by FEMA to round up political enemies of the government. The reason I do is that we have these due process protections and any action like that would be unconstitutional and illegal. We are protected by the Constitution from this kind of thing. However measures like these two, if put in place, would be the first steps towards enabling that kind of thing in the future.
It is clear that the worst thing that can happen has happened to Senator Lieberman, he is living in fear. What we need to do is be sure that he and others like him do not inflict the costs of that fear on us in the name of improved security. He is chasing a chimera with this, and it will only increase the number of risks we face if we follow him.
The floor is yours. |
