McCain's Unconstitutional Desire for the NY Car Bomber

Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, you're probably aware of the failed terrorist attempt to explode a car bomb in New York's Times Square over the weekend. This act is disgusting in nature, completely unjustifiable, and should be dealt with properly. But, sadly, some in our government are already showing their disregard for the Constitution when discussing the situation.

On Tuesday, Sen. John McCain plainly vocalized his views regarding the Justice Department's actions. According to Sen. McCain, "It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights." The Arizona senator went on to explain that only after receiving "all the information we have" and finding out what the attack is "all about" should we even consider reading the suspect his rights.

So, in essence, the senator would like to gut the rights reading process of all its significance. His approach amounts to the following: Find out if one's rights will get in the way. If they don't, go ahead and let them have them. If they do, let the Constitution be damned.

Of course, the argument over the rights of terrorists is no new one; we have faced it a number of times, including the controversy around last year's Christmas Eve bomber case. But where those cases centered around the issue of whether or not a non-citizen had constitutional rights, this particular case does not.

The Times Square terror suspect is an American citizen, and there is no denying his constitutional rights of due process warrant protection. Making this claim is in no way an act of sympathy toward the would-be murderer or a call to impede justice. Rather, it is a call for justice as required by the Constitution--a justice that doesn't dissolve liberty or the rule of law.

If the suspect is truly guilty, he will face a number of charges that carry with them the death penalty. McCain even admits that he thinks justice will be served through traditional channels. Therefore, his concern is obviously unmerited, if it is justice he seeks. Still, wanting to squeeze information from the suspect without constitutional restrictions, McCain is dissatisfied with granting a US citizen his rights.

In a country gone mad, rights have become the enemy and disregard for the rule of law has become the desired norm. When the desire is for even US citizens to be denied basic rights, we are truly in danger.

I am confident that justice will be served, and I am confident that the Constitution will aid in carrying it out. Otherwise, we will merely see injustice on the part of the state. The Constitution protects liberty for us all. When its protection is eroded, even for undeserving terrorists, we all suffer in the long run.

Evangelists Suffer Fourth Amendment Violations for Phony Money

We have another one to file under ridiculous and unconstitutional government action.

WorldNetDaily reports:

A federal judge has ruled the seizure of thousands of Gospel tracts from a Texas ministry by U.S. Secret Service agents not only was illegal, it violated Fourth Amendment protections against an overbearing and intrusive government.

The decision [Monday] by Judge Jorge Solis of the Northern District of Texas came in the long-running dispute over a tract deliberately made to look like a $1 million bill. 

The Gospel tracts in question can be viewed at this link and are harmless pieces of paper used by a number of evangelists in sharing their faith. I have even passed them out myself. Don't tell the feds; I have some in my room as I write.

The tracts bear the image of Grover Cleavland--a nice classical liberal president--so you know they would never put him on a real bills, they are for the amount of $1 million, and they explicitly state that it is not legal tender. Problematic, I know...not.

The judge correctly noted, "The Million Dollar Bill, taken as a whole, poses no reasonable risk of deceiving an honest, sensible, and unsuspecting person. First and foremost is the fact that the Million Dollar Bill purports to be worth a million dollars. There is no genuine curency in this amount."

Only a federal bureaucrat could be fooled by such a harmless device. And only the government would use force against such an undeserving party. And boy did they use force!

According to the court's opinion, the agents then threatened arrest if the workers did not cooperate.

"Agent [Mickey] Kennedy was not subtle in the manner by which he implied that he was taking the Million Dollar Bills with him no matter what – even if it meant arresting Mr. [Timothy] Crawford in the process. The facts and circumstances surrounding Agent Kennedy's statements to Mr. Crawford on June 2, 2006, leave no doubt that Mr. Crawford believed he would be arrested if he did not retrieve the Million Dollar Bills from the closed closet in which they were hidden out of the agents' sight," the judge ruled.

Further, the judge concluded that the agents involved in the seizure later "conspired together to cover up the actual events that took place at GNN's office.

"Agents Kennedy and [Erin] Erdman persisted in covering up these events by being untruthful when they took the witness stand during the bench trial for this case," the judge concluded.

This is nothing short of despicable behavior. Lacking a warrant and realizing that they could intimidate the Christian evangelists, the agents knowingly violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the victims. Then they lied on the witness stand to cover their tracks.

So besides the blame that rightfully should fall upon the agents who carried out the illegal seizure, is there more blame to go around? Sure there is.

First, this happening reveals the ridiculous monopoly our government has on money and the outrageous lengths it will go through to maintain that monopoly. What we have is a government that prints worthless money attacking citizens for handing out worthless money. Can you see how crazy this is? Not only were the tracts not real money, they were not even trying to be real money. But that is not enough for our government. We are obsessed with legal tender laws, we are obsessed with monetary manipulation, and now we must be obsessed with putting a stop to the equivalent of Monopoly money.

Second, this event shows our government's disrespect for the Fourth Amendment. For far too long our civil liberties have been trampled in the name of security and justice. But violation of the Constitution can only lead to insecurity and injustice. When civil libertarians have come out against these types of violations in the past, those on the Left and Right have called paranoia and claimed that only the bad guys would suffer. Is this still the case? Are Christian evangelists the hardened criminals or vile terrorists one expected to "deserve" Forth Amendment violation? I would think not!

Thomas Jefferson once said,  "It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." The same is true of any tenet of liberty. We must defend liberty at all turns, for another's case may, by change of circumstances, become our own someday.

We see in the aforementioned case an example of a government gone awry. It has done so because we have allowed it. If we do not truly value liberty and contend for it, we will see more of the same. Moreover, we see that not only the "bad guys" suffer when the government goes beyond its constitutional bounds; we all do.