House and Senate negotiators are unable to agree on immigration reform in part because the Senate refuses to make illegal immigration a felony. So what sort of trespass are senators willing to fully criminalize and punish? Americans walking on their own public property in defiance of some government gumshoe.
In case you missed it: Before voting to make the Patriot Act permanent, Congress inserted a provision that puts the Secret Service in charge of designated national events. Even when no Secret Service protectees are present, agents will have the authority to arrest individuals for felony trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Although this legislation sounds benign, it sets a dangerous precedent. While other police officers cannot arrest a citizen without citing violation of a specific law, the Secret Service is not bound by such constraints; its agents may act arbitrarily.
Since it is legally nonsensical to charge someone on public property with trespass, the Secret Service defines trespassing as walking where an agent says you may not. Daring to question such capricious edicts constitutes disturbing the peace.
This is exactly the sort of subjective policing the Constitution is designed to thwart.
By virtue of a badly written law, the Secret Service has almost unlimited authority to act on behalf of those it’s charged with protecting. Now that Congress has expanded the agency’s mission beyond presidential protection, the Secret Service can wield virtually unlimited power in virtually unlimited venues.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe the agency will exercise restraint. As an executive-branch police force, the Secret Service answers, ultimately, only to the president; and George W. Bush clearly is determined to give the agents free rein.
Recall that Bush’s 2001 inauguration — before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — marked the first time in history that Americans were barred from standing along Pennsylvania Avenue. The Secret Service commandeered the street and corralled citizens through police checkpoints.
Some emboldened agents employ goon-squad tactics to intimidate the president’s critics. After a college student wrote a satirical editorial asking Jesus to “smite George W. Bush,” the Secret Service threatened to charge him with a crime, searched his apartment and demanded access to his medical records.
Agents descended on Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez after he drew a caricature of Bush held at gunpoint by an assailant labeled “politics” — a cartoon supportive of the president. The docent of a Texas art museum was interrogated by Secret Service agents when the museum displayed an exhibit on covert government operations. After a woman at a Boeing plant Bush was visiting refused to move to a containment area for protesters, she and her 5-year-old daughter were arrested and hauled away in separate squad cars.
Yet instead of condemning this pattern of infringement on free speech, Congress broadened the powers of the Secret Service?
The new law does not specify what constitutes a National Special Security Event (previous ones have included the Super Bowl, Inauguration Day 2005 and Ronald Reagan’s state funeral), but it is a safe bet that more events will be classified as such so the Secret Service can exert control.
If history teaches, the agency will establish excessive precautions that impose unnecessary inconvenience, and some impatient person will defy the restrictions. Only now, that citizen will be charged with a felony and carted off to jail.
When local police officers overreach, citizens have recourse. They can appeal to the police chief, the mayor, the city manager, the media, the city council or the courts. But there is no appeal from the dictates of the Secret Service. Whom are you going to complain to — the president?
Ours is supposed to be “a nation of laws and not men,” but the statute authorizing the Secret Service gives presidents a way around that: All they have to do is claim self-protection, and a president’s word becomes law. He can treat streets, airports, sidewalks and parks as his private domain. It is not a mark of progress that he now can do that even when his safety isn’t a factor.
This Patriot Act provision pushes the country farther in the lamentable direction it is moving: from a nation where people were free to do as they pleased, so long as they didn’t break any laws, to a nation where people are free to do only what their government expressly permits.
It is just one more instance of using the war on terror as an excuse to wage war on freedom.
Melanie Scarborough is a freelance journalist in Alexandria.
