Fight for Your Rights

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Fight for Your Rights

 

Fight for Your RightsJohn Powers, LA Weekly

July 7, 2003Viewed on July 7, 2003

 

" Difficile est saturam non scribere, " declared Juvenal, the great scourge of

Roman corruption: " It is difficult not to write satire. "

 

The task has gotten no easier in today's America, where political reality often

seems like a joke cooked up by The Daily Show. Back in March, Justice Antonin

Scalia, the intellectual Torquemada of Supreme Court conservatives, went to

Cleveland to accept the local City Club's " Citadel of Free Speech Award. "

Demonstrating his love for the First Amendment, he banned broadcast media from

his speech and refused to answer any questions from reporters.

 

But the previous day at John Carroll University, Scalia had let it all hang out.

" The Constitution just sets minimums, " he declared with unnerving bluntness.

" Most of the rights you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires. "

 

The Bush administration evidently agrees, for ever since 9/11, it has been

rolling back civil liberties that most of us take for granted. The most obvious

example is 2001's preposterously acronymed USA PATRIOT Act (as in Uniting and

Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and

Obstruct Terrorism). This hastily thrown-together bill was passed 96-1 by a

Senate whose members didn't have time to scan its highly detailed 342 pages, let

alone ponder its niceties. Flouting numerous principles of constitutional law,

the act gave the federal government unprecedented new power to secretly round up

suspects, hold them indefinitely without charge and snoop into people's private

lives (phone calls, credit-card bills, library records) by invoking national

security in a special closed court.

 

Bad as it was, the PATRIOT Act didn't turn America into a police state. Howard

Dean isn't under house arrest; the Dixie Chicks haven't been " disappeared " ; I

don't write these words in fear that I'll be arrested and put in a cell with

Andrew Luster ( " Whatever you do, don't fall asleep! " ). Of course, things would

have been much worse had John Ashcroft been allowed to run as wild as he

desired. Indeed, one fascinating detail to emerge from Steven Brill's massive,

breathtakingly anal " After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era " is that

the attorney general's initial proposals were so nakedly repressive that they

shocked Republican congressmen and the White House, neither of which he'd

bothered to consult as he laid waste to the Constitution. Even they thought he

sounded like a witch-finder general.

 

If most Americans don't yet view the PATRIOT Act as an assault on our common

rights, this is largely because its worst provisions have barely touched them or

the people they know. The real target has been Muslim noncitizens, hundreds of

whom have been locked up at inordinate length -- unnamed, uncharged and

sometimes physically abused -- for the sort of run-of-the-mill immigration

violations that I myself have committed in other countries that somehow managed

not to jail me with no legal recourse. And things are every bit as dire at the

Guantanamo Bay base, where, virtually the whole world agrees, the U.S.

government's treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners (some of them children)

is in clear violation of the Geneva Accords.

 

Although less disgraceful than World War II internment camps, such rough justice

is so un-American as to be shocking. Yet it comes as little surprise that it has

prompted scant outcry from elected officials, the mass media or the population

at large. For starters, it takes courage to oppose restrictions on freedom after

a traumatic terror attack, which is why vaunted liberal politicians quickly

hopped aboard the PATRIOT Act juggernaut ( " Hello, Senator Kerry. " " Hi,

Hillary. " ) and New York Times Constitution-hugger William Safire didn't start

bashing Ashcroft until almost two months after the legislative damage had been

done. But there's a deeper attitude at work here, too. As Michael Kinsley

recently noted in Slate, Americans have become blase about the liberty that some

of those imprisoned noncitizens risked everything to get. " After 230 years, " he

observed wryly, " we don't need to love freedom in order to have it. " Most of us

-- as Kinsley admitted of himself with disarming honesty

-- don't bother to do the homework about the state of our constitutional

protections.

 

Well, it's time to get started. For even as the White House fights hard to

protect its own " right " not to tell us things that might prove embarrassing --

it has blocked public release of the 800-page congressional report on 9/11 and

refused to reveal the workings of Dick Cheney's secret energy task force -- our

own freedoms are being whittled away.

 

Just consider:

 

In March, the Senate passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which will be

ratified by the House this summer and signed into law by President Bush. This

marks another step in the slow dismantling of abortion rights, a process that

could suddenly kick into high gear if Bush is able to appoint a new Supreme

Court justice to replace Sandra Day O'Connor.

 

On May 27, the Rehnquist court gutted the 1966 Miranda decision designed to

assure suspects' rights against self-incrimination. It accepted the Bush

administration's chilling argument that " police can hold people in custody and

force them to talk, so long as their incriminating statements are not used to

prosecute them. " In this particular case, the court ruled that police were

justified in interrogating Oliverio Martinez, who'd just been shot five times,

once in the face, and was shrieking for help even as they grilled him.

 

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is proceeding with Total Information

Awareness (TIA, now renamed Terrorist Information Awareness), a program headed

by former Reagan National Security Adviser John Poindexter, an admirable fellow

who was convicted in 1990 of five counts of giving misleading and false

statements to Congress. (The conviction was later overturned on a technicality.)

Working under the aegis of the Pentagon, Poindexter's Information Awareness

Office intends to create a vast electronic dragnet that would (among other

things) let the FBI, CIA and other intelligence groups reconstruct the movements

of citizens through scrutiny of bank records, credit-card purchases, e-mail

messages, phone calls, government forms, drug prescriptions, library checkouts

and even the movies we buy on pay-per-view. Done in the name of anti-terrorism

(what isn't, these days?), TIA implies a level of Big Brotherish snooping that

has even me listening for the black helicopters.

 

And if all that weren't enough, the White House is currently seeking to fill the

lower courts with more Scalias and Clarence Thomases, right-wing judges who

threaten to use the bench to push through the ultraconservative agenda the

Republicans can't muster the votes to pass into law.

 

Naturally, it's tempting to blame our eroding liberties on a president who has

joked more than once that, compared to democracy, " a dictatorship would be a

whole lot easier. " (Any thoughts on that one, Dr. Freud?) But Bush's lack of

concern for our rights is hardly unique to him or his party. Just last month the

California Assembly displayed an utter lack of concern for its constituents'

privacy in the face of corporate power: By an egregious 9-3 margin -- which

suggests a small fortune in campaign contributions -- a Democrat-dominated

committee killed a landmark bill that would require our written approval before

our financial information could be sold to telemarketers and other businesses.

Perhaps the committee members thought we enjoy all those mechanized, dinnertime

phone calls.

 

This, too, was no aberration. Although Republicans are perceived as moralistic

champions of the punitive crackdown -- anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Hollywood,

anti-anti-anti-anti -- the Democrat Party is itself not exactly bursting with

loyalty to the idea of personal freedom. Accustomed to defending government

power against conservatives eager to privatize everything, it often loses sight

of the state's own capacity for tyranny.

 

This blindness was on display during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who, after

executing the retarded Ricky Ray Rector as part of his 1992 election campaign,

led an administration known for high-profile civil-liberties debacles -- from

the slaughter in Waco (which killed children in order to save them) to the

jackbooted seizure of Elian Gonzalez. Eager to prove himself tough on crime,

Clinton was behind both the 1994 crime bill, which expanded application of the

death penalty for over 50 crimes and forced communications companies to make

their systems wiretap-ready, and the ghastly Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death

Penalty Act of 1996, which limited habeas corpus petitions by the condemned. The

latter bill led ACLU chief Ira Glasser to a crushing judgment: " When historians

write the story of civil liberties in the 20th century, they will say that the

Clinton administration adopted an agenda that has everything to do with

weakening civil rights and nothing to do with combating

terrorism. "

 

Before I'm inundated with angry letters, let me add that I'm not denying the

difference between Clinton and Bush. Although disappointingly " moderate, "

Clinton's judicial appointments were less reactionary than his successor's and

his attitude toward government more committed to ordinary people. If Clinton

expanded the state's power over the individual, he also believed that the state

has profound responsibilities to the individual: It is there to provide

life-enhancing services. Not so Bush, who pursues a far cruder ideological

agenda. Even as he exploits fear of terrorism to chip away at constitutional

rights, he champions the inalienable rights of property (think of his horror at

the " double " taxation of dividends) and mistrusts the idea of public services

being provided by the government -- which is why he apparently doesn't mind

bankrupting it with his budget.

 

Still, the fact remains that both Republicans and Democrats have willingly

backed policies that increase the government's power at the expense of

constitutional rights; they are part of the same continuum. That's one reason

why we're seeing the collapse of the old categories of left and right. These

days, the strongest voices for civil rights come from the anti-corporate left

and the libertarian right -- The Nation lies down with the Cato Institute. For

the left, this is not without its awkwardness. It means recognizing that Bob

Barr, the mouth-breathing Georgia congressman who was among the first to call

for Clinton's impeachment, has worked hard to diminish Ashcroft's assaults on

the Constitution; it means acknowledging that former House Majority Leader Dick

Armey, a wacko Texas right-winger, led the fight against the Bush

administration's proposed Operation TIPS, a Stalin-worthy scheme designed to get

millions of Americans reporting on each other to the authorities. (Now, that's

Neighborhood Watch.)

 

While it's easy to scoff at the libertarian right, whose ideas about personal

property make Bush look like Proudhon, its soaring confidence provides a

valuable jolt of pro-rights energy in a period when too many progressives have

fallen into a hysterical defeatism: They keep trying to paint a Hitler mustache

on Bush or to inflate cheap attacks on Sean Penn into a new McCarthyism. It's a

measure of the left's disarray that one senses in it a perverse nostalgia for

the glory days when Der Fuhrer was hanging communists on meat hooks or

Tail-Gunner Joe was ruining the lives of supposed " Reds. " You know, back when

the left occupied the high ground, morally superior and doomed.

 

Now, there's no denying that these are hard times for our civil liberties, which

are feebly defended by the centrist ruling elite (which complains about the loss

of rights only after it has voted to remove them) and erratically covered by the

mainstream media, which get riled up only by attacks on freedom of the press.

Then again, we should never count on our liberties being defended by leaders of

any kind. As the great socialist Eugene V. Debs famously declared, " I would not

lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in,

someone else would lead you out. " The same logic holds true here: If we expect

other people to protect our freedoms, then other people can also take them away.

 

To stop this from happening, one has to fight -- even when it's hard or boring.

This means paying heed to the machinations of Washington (the Bush

administration feeds on the public's lack of attention), sending money to

constitutional-watchdog groups such as the ACLU (which Kinsley aptly terms the

canary down the mineshaft of constitutional rights) and, if necessary, carrying

the battle to the streets, which is where most of our freedoms were won in the

first place. Although the Bush administration encourages a pacifying sense of

powerlessness (think of Dubya's air of lordly disdain about the anti-war

demonstrations), it is fearful of popular opinion -- it hasn't forgotten that

the majority of voters were against him last time. When the shockingly

tyrannical provisions of PATRIOT Act II were leaked to the wider world, the

instant outcry helped stop things cold -- even Bill O'Reilly got into the act.

Once the public heard about Operation TIPS, which turned informing on one's

neighbor

into a national ethic, the revulsion was so powerful that Congress wound up

explicitly banning it. After the media finally began covering the FCC's recent

decision on media ownership, the reaction was so negative that the Senate

Commerce Committee actually found the courage to roll it back (though the White

House is likely to push for it once it falls off the radar).

 

Such triumphs may not sound big and glamorous, but that's how freedom is usually

gained -- slowly, painfully, against the wishes of those in power, however

benevolent they may think themselves. As Woodrow Wilson put it during the 1912

election campaign: " Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has

always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of

resistance. "

 

Wilson was absolutely right, which is why on Independence Day, 2003, it's worth

remembering that the constitutional freedoms we enjoy weren't sent down from

heaven or plucked off a tree. They were born of centuries of struggle by untold

millions who fought and bled and died to make sure that our government can't

just walk into our bedroom or read our mail, can't throw us in jail without

proving to the world its right to hold us, can't torture us into making

confessions, can't compel us to pray to a god we don't believe in or prohibit us

from saying whatever damn thing is on our mind. It's our fault and our shame if

we forget that such hard-won liberties can be taken away by the likes of Justice

Scalia, that constitutional minimalist, who won't simply feel self-righteous as

he takes away our rights, but will do so behind closed doors where there are no

TV cameras or reporters to ask unwanted questions about all we've lost.

 

 

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

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