David Freddoso over on Beltway Confidential posted this video of Ron Paul (R, TX) introducing his new bill, The American Traveler Dignity Act, on the House floor. The legislation would help curb the growing power of the federal government and the TSA in American airports. Here’s Paul’s idea in a nutshell:
I’m not sure if Paul’s legislation will gather much momentum, but if there was ever a time to try and curtail the powers of the TSA, that time is now. Public outrage over gropings, invasive body scans, and the targeting of young children for full body pat-downs, is reaching a bubbling point. The blogs have never been so unanimously opposed to a government program, with bloggers on the left and the right agreeing that something must be done to put an end to the security theater playing out in our airports. As Paul noted in his speech, Americans have become too submissive. It’s high time we quit acting like sheep.
Naturally, whenever something good is also popular across partisan lines, it stands little chance of success. And security issues are even more difficult to reverse. After all, it only takes one attack on an airplane to initiate yet another round of liberty-crushing government security programs aimed not so much at keeping us safe but at keeping the security establishment off the hook. Security is largely an illusion. No matter how many ways we mangle our constitutional rights in the name of security, there will always be ways for terrorists to harm us. I would argue the mangling of our rights is all the harm they really need to inflict.
Paul is also correct to note that the pilot’s gun in the locked cockpit has done by far the most to secure flights – not the long security lines at airports, not body scanners.
Where does it end? As a matter of logic, it ends with a free people dehumanizing themselves in a way their own enemies cannot quite manage to do. Fortunately, we are not prisoners of logic. But the awful thing about terrorism is that it very well might keep us prisoner to fear.
Didn’t a president once mention that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself?
Perhaps we should have heeded those words a little more closely when we created the TSA in the first place. We should heed them now.
