WARNING! This is an angry letter. Ladies, escort the children from the room. Philosophers, retreat to your ivory towers. Friends of liberty, draw near.
Three agencies of national government are out of control and recklessly endangering our lives, liberty, and property. They are the Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency, and U.S. Census Bureau. A lame-duck President is using these agencies to create a “legacy” while Congress stands by and does nothing. Survival of our individual liberties and the Rule of Law hang in the balance.
Department of Justice
We begin with the incredible spectacle of heavily armed agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), storming the Miami home of Lazaro Gonzalez, pointing an automatic weapon at a frightened and crying six-year-old child named Elian, and tearing him from the arms of the fisherman who had rescued him from the ocean a few months earlier.
As the story unfolded on television and in the newspapers, many of us thought, “I can’t believe this is happening in America.” I ask you to think about that statement for a moment. How often do we witness situations that are so profoundly undemocratic and unjust that we think they can’t be taking place here, in our country?
Two similar incidents come to mind: the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, and the killing by federal agents of Randy Weaver’s wife and child at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The modus operandi in each case is the same: assaults by paramilitary personnel without giving the victims an opportunity to surrender peaceably; DOJ spokespersons making false promises until just hours or even minutes before the raids began; suppression of media coverage; and outright lies about what happened.
The Department of Justice’s behavior in these cases resulted from the subordination of justice to politics, a reversal of constitutionally defined roles that threatens to corrupt the nation’s entire legal system. We also see it in DOJ’s failure to investigate Clinton and Gore campaign finance scandals, its attempt to sue tobacco companies despite the agency’s own legal analysis saying no grounds for such a suit exist, and its campaigns to break up Microsoft and intimidate gun manufacturers.
This is an attack on the Rule of Law. If the law is not enforced without regard to who wins and who loses, and if the Constitution no longer protects individual citizens from the coercive power of the state, then ordered liberty cannot long endure. The alternative to liberty is tyranny, and the only issue left to decide is who shall wield arbitrary power over others.
Environmental Protection Agency
The second out-of-control government agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In the past year, federal courts stepped in at least three times to keep EPA from exceeding its legal authority.
In May 1999, a federal court ruled that EPA’s draconian new air quality standards were arbitrary and must be revised. In April 2000, a court rejected EPA’s proposed “zero tolerance” rule for the disinfection byproducts of chlorinated water, saying the proposal was contradicted by the agency’s own review of the “best available science.” And in May 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on whether EPA’s policy of deliberately disregarding the cost of its regulations is required by the Clean Air Act.
But this rogue agency isn’t easily stopped. It has filed actions against 44 electric plants in the Midwest and South claiming that maintenance and repairs previously approved by the agency are now in violation of the Clean Air Act. It has claimed authority to regulate livestock and tree plantations as “point sources” of water pollution, a designation previously reserved for factories and other stationary facilities. It is about to participate in the release of an inter-agency report on global warming that is alarmist, unscientific, and political.
EPA’s regulations often affect big corporations directly and consumers only indirectly. But sometimes we see real people hurt by EPA’s arbitrary power. I met some of those people a few weeks ago at the “Fly In for Freedom,” an annual gathering in Washington DC sponsored by the Alliance for America, an umbrella organization representing over 500 community groups and associations.
I listened as one woman, choking back tears, told us how her husband had just served a prison term for improving wildlife habitat on their own land without EPA’s permission. Her husband, who looked to be about 65 or older, sat beside her, crying, as she spoke. When’s the last time you saw an older man cry? Let me tell you: It cuts like a knife.
I heard first-hand accounts of life in communities devastated by the Clinton-Gore bans on logging on public lands. In one such town, times are so hard that 30 people lined up to interview for a part-time custodian position that pays the minimum wage. Men and women, whose faces were chiseled by a lifetime spent defying wind and sun, described their losing battles against petty bureaucrats to keep ranches, farms, and forests that had been in their families for generations.
They call it “rural cleansing”: a coordinated effort by radical environmentalists and government agencies to take their property and force them to move to cities and suburbs. And as I listened, I thought, “I can’t believe this is happening in America.”
U.S. Census Bureau
Diane and I (wouldn’t you know?) got the 52-question long-form from the Census Bureau. Like millions of other Americans, we filled out only the first few questions and left the rest of it blank. By doing so, we risk a fine and repeated visits to our home by census takers.
To fend off those pesky census takers, I hastily designed a sign to post on our door that reads “Census Workers Are Not Welcome Here. Do Not Knock.” It has some lines to indicate the age and sex of members of our household, and it ends saying, “This is all you need to know and are entitled to ask. Have a nice day.”
I decided to have the sign appear on the back cover of the June issue of our monthly newspaper, Environment & Climate News. Soon it was in the hands of 45,000 people.
Reaction was swift and divided. Some people wrote to say they had immediately posted the signs on their doors or made extra copies to distribute to friends and neighbors. Others, though, thought it was “anti-government” and “right-wing” and didn’t have anything to do with free-market environmentalism.
On June 8, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau held up a copy of our sign during a press conference in Washington DC, saying it illustrates what they are up against as they try to persuade people to talk to census takers. The June 9 issue of USA Today described the news conference and quoted from our sign.
I object to the census, especially the long form, because it intrudes into the privacy of citizens far beyond any reasonable interpretation of the “enumeration” authorized by the Constitution. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t counsel people to break the law, but it seems to me that compelling people to surrender to the government detailed information about their homes, families, and lifestyles is a search with neither a warrant nor probable cause. That violates the Fourth Amendment.
Our founding fathers recognized that preventing random searches is essential to preserving our freedoms. You don’t need to be “right-wing” to figure out why: Searches can easily be a pretense for entry onto private property for other reasons. They enable harassment of various kinds and for various ends. Political opposition is extremely difficult if government is free to search the homes and offices of critics of the current administration, as civil rights advocates in Cuba and China can attest.
Are You Paranoid?
You may be thinking that all this sounds pretty paranoid. I don’t blame you for being skeptical. Chances are, you haven’t had an armed government agent bust down your door to snatch one of your children. Your business hasn’t been targeted for destruction by a federal judge. You probably don’t depend on logging or some other use of public lands to feed your family.
Right now, everything seems to be going pretty smoothly for most Americans. The economy is piling up records (longest recovery in history, lowest unemployment rate, record productivity growth). No one is being drafted to fight an unpopular war. Cable TV ensures that there’s usually a good movie on every night.
Maybe I am just paranoid. Or perhaps one day, in the not-too-distant future, it will be your turn to hear a knock on your door. And in the minutes that follow, you will be thinking to yourself, “I can’t believe this is happening in America.”
