American's Rights Matters!

[XLFD]

While many of us Americans are just getting over our Independence Day vacations, enjoying the beautiful summer weather, or otherwise enmeshed on one side or the other of shootings of cops and citizens predominating the news, your Congress is in the process of trying to take even more of your Fourth Amendment rights in a series of three bills going through the House of Representatives. 

These bills were primarily germinated by fear from the recent terrorist attacks occurring on our soil.  Using the same knee-jerk reactions that inspired the Patriot Act after the 9-11 attacks, these three bills seek to allow authorities to get someone's financial information and potentially seize assets without needing a warrant or even probable cause.   The House Liberty Caucus issued the following warning about two of those bills:

The strongest of the bills, however, HR 5606, came to a vote under suspension of the rules in the house this evening, requiring 2/3 of the representatives present to vote aye for it.  When the House Republican leadership does these suspensions, they generally figure they have the votes to pass it.  And there are plenty of Democrats willing to suspend rights in order to appear tough on terrorism in their campaign ads.  But a directed effort by Republicans concerned with the diminution of rights, led by Western Michigan Representative Justin Amash and other modern day disciples of Ron Paul, stopped it in its tracks, Amash releasing this meme to commemorate the victory:

What would HR 5606 have done if it was passed through the rest of government to make a law.  According to another memo from Matt Weibel, the Executive Director of the HLC, it would have done the following:

Contrary to the bill’s title, H.R. 5606 is not about anti-terrorism. The bill improperly extends an anti-terrorism statute, the Patriot Act, to the investigation of domestic, non-terrorism crimes. Section 314 of the Patriot Act encourages the government to share information on terrorism and money laundering with financial institutions. It also encourages such information sharing among financial institutions. Treasury regulations, however, have flipped Section 314 on its head; the department has applied the section to require financial institutions to share information with the government. If H.R. 5606 becomes law, this section of the Patriot Act will become substantially more powerful and susceptible to abuse, because the Treasury may require financial institutions to share information on countless private transactions that have no connection to terrorism.

H.R. 5606 violates our Fourth Amendment-secured right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the government may not conduct unreasonable searches and seizures. With limited exception, a search or seizure is unreasonable if it occurs without probable cause and a warrant. Section 314 of the Patriot Act attempts to sidestep this constitutional protection by treating a domestic criminal investigation like a foreign terrorism investigation, and H.R. 5606 extends the applicability to a much wider range of criminal investigations. In short, if the regulations issued under the bill are consistent with current regulations, H.R. 5606 will permit the government to demand information on any American from any financial institution merely upon reasonable suspicion.

H.R. 5606 delegates significant authority to the Department of the Treasury to issue regulations that violate our rights. Our laws should come from Congress, not from a regulatory body. The Treasury has relied upon the vague drafting of Section 314 of the Patriot Act to issue far-reaching regulations. H.R. 5606, which rests upon this same section of law, multiplies the problem and threatens the constitutionally protected rights of all Americans.

So, continue enjoying the summer and supporting either the cops in the tough job they do, or those that appear to be getting the worse of their encounters with those cops.  But continue remaining vigilant or else all of those rights you just celebrated on the Fourth of July, will soon be gone.

[Willy]

Thanks for posting this X. These types of bills demonstrate 2 very important points. First, that the Republicans are pretty much like the Democrats seeing that the bill was sponsored by both party members and secondly that terrorists need not commit another crime against the U.S. because since 911 both party's are more than willing to relinquish our rights and freedoms. The terrorists have caused the chicken sh_t politicians to run around in circles like hysterical children while Americans are loosing our Constitutional rights on a daily basis. The terrorists have won.