Stay on guard

Over the waning years of the Clinton regime and the first few weeks of the Bush regime, a commission chaired by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart (one Republican, one Democrat) published a report that proposed, among many other Draconian measures, a Department of Homeland Security that would wage the domestic war against terrorists by reshaping the United States of America as a police state rather than the land of the free. Of course I'm paraphrasing. The group's third of three reports - "Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change" is dated Feb. 15, 2001, and carried as its top recommendation:

We therefore recommend the creation of an independent National Homeland Security
Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S.
government activities involved in homeland security. NHSA would be built upon the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, with the three organizations currently on the front line of
border security—the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Border Patrol—transferred to it.
NHSA would not only protect American lives, but also assume responsibility for overseeing the
protection of the nation’s critical infrastructure, including information technology.

The various provisions of this plan went largely unnoticed by Americans and untouched by Congress for the next seven months. Like those of many presidential commissions, the report went up on the shelf and began its inevitable collecting of dust.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. By the end of October, most of the Hart-Rudman report - with lip service to its insistence that "The legal foundation for the National Homeland Security Agency would rest firmly within the array of Constitutional guarantees for civil liberties" - had been encoded into law, along with every other bad idea for keeping an eye on us pesky citizens - as the USAPATRIOT Act. I remember one talk show host who in 2000 successfully got his listeners enraged enough about one proposal (the "Know Your Customers Act" would require banks to alert the feds anytime someone transferred more than $10,000) who in late '01 was OK with the idea as a way to prevent terrorists from funding their operations.

I also remember cheering when the New Hampshire legislature banned implementation of the "Real ID Paperss Pleeze Act" only to watch in horror as those same lawmakers were bought out.

The reason I bring this up is because of the relief that Congress has "seen the light" and pulled back the Free Speech Registration Act that horrified everyone from Richard Viguerie to the American Civil Liberties Union, the one that "would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress."

By a 55-43 vote, the Senate passed an amendment that, for now, takes that language out of Senate Bill 1. Key words: "for now." Past experience shows that when an attack on freedom can't walk in the front door, it walks around to the back door or climbs in a window.

Make no mistake: These people intend to muzzle Americans. They will try again, probably while a slack-jawed Washington press corps oohs and aahhs over the announcements of who's running for president. While they place bets on the horse race, Congress is quietly going about its work of dismantling everything this country once stood for.