Fair enough. Then again, @johnthacker called 53% “a huge supermajority” so this doesn’t seem so egregious to me.
Compare to the senate vote. “Much less bipartisan” is an understatement. (And a matter of opinion, so probably not the most productive point.)
Sure, there is some sense in which this is a “bipartisan policy”. However, the pressure to implement the policy came exclusively from the right. Go ahead and find me the crowds of liberals shouting for more restrictions on civil liberties.
The drive for the Patriot Act was a result of xenophobic, war-mongering rhetoric from the Republicans. Polling indicated quite clearly that Democrats who had any concern about their next elections would lose if they stood up for civil liberties.
If you’re not taking the political climate of the time into account, then you’re not making an honest assessment of the incentives in play and therefore the culpability of the various parties.
Actually, no. This came up in previous questioning in Congress.
It’s exactly the reverse of what someone was opining up-thread. The intelligence agencies rightly consider the No-fly List insecure, because it’s widely distributed within the TSA and must be accessible to the airlines and will be accessed by people without security clearance. Therefore, they may include people who are under general suspicion but they will not add actual known active terrorists to the no-fly lists, because that might be leaked back to them and would disclose the valuable intelligence that they are terrorists, which might reveal something about their sources.
They do however allow the names of terrorists who are already known to be dead to be added to the No-fly List, where they can forever screw up the lives of anybody with a remotely similar name.
Does Bruce Schneier’s trick of printing your own boarding pass in a different name to get past security still work? Or have they somehow closed that loophole?
Not long after 9/11, I made a donation to the Green Party, and for about five or six years afterwards, I consistently got “special” screening every single time I flew. Gate agents and ticket agents both confirmed that I had a ‘flag’ on my account but wouldn’t specify why, but I was frequently called out for extra pat-downs and luggage emptying at the gate itself as well as normal security.
You do know that the first battles of the Revolutionary War erupted near Lexington & Concord precisely because the British wanted to disarm a rebel colony? They probably felt the need to enumerate it because they had historical precedence for a polity sometimes needing quick access to weaponry.
In Donald S. Miller v. the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the Supreme Court ruled that there simply is no “fundamental right to drive."
[quote=“nungesser, post:44, topic:70524, full:true”]I think Cory missed the point of the President’s remarks.
He wasn’t celebrating the no-fly list or proclaiming it a great way to weed out terrorists. He was using it as an example of low-hanging fruit; i.e., our methods of preventing guns from getting in the hands of terrorists are so weak that we don’t even look to something as poorly curated as the no-fly list for hints as to who shouldn’t get guns. We literally have zero checks for that sort of thing, which, as he says, is insane.
[/quote]
Democrats claim we literally have zero checks for that sort of thing, but the FBI says otherwise.
I believe the Supremes have also ruled that the second amendment does not mean people can have unlimited guns of any variety. State gun laws are perfectly constitutional.
One thing that pops to mind, and this isn’t facetious, is a warrant.
Monitoring movement with a ‘no fly list’ is the opposite of good. Either surveil them legally without letting them know, or don’t. The list just smacks of Law Lite.
The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to unify and overarch the other entities. I clearly remember the run up to its inception. The no fly list was supposed to be one of the ways departments and sub departments can share information efficiently. Instead, it’s become something Nazi and foreign to our sensibility as freedom-fuckers.
You are correct. There are MANY “destructive devices” that are expressly forbidden, such as artillery, rpg’s, grenades, sawed off shotguns. Apart from these, the states oversee most of gun ownership law.
And clearly, that’s working out so well for all of us.
Right now, people on the watch list are legally buying assault rifles. That tells me we need a better system. And that’s what the President is saying. I’m not sure why anyone, whatever their politics, would disagree with that.
There are 6400 people in the world on that list, and the TSA and airlines still mis-id them. It smacks of McCarthyism–i am a card carrying peace loving pacifist, but jebus arrest the people on the list or dissolve it. Don’t use it as a gun purchase check. (Well, not you, unless you are secretly a senator. ;D)
That’s where it gets tricky. Obama’s already constantly accused by the GOP of being ‘soft on terrorism’ and for secretly being a terrorist himself; dissolving the no-fly list would be the worst thing he could do for that image. Since the NRA has essentially the entire GOP in its pocket, the President is blocked from doing anything substantial to help this situation. I see his mention of the no-fly list as grasping at straws: i.e., “look, how about THIS? Can we at least agree that the list of people that you yourselves have declared to be security risks shouldn’t be able to buy military assault rifles?”
He’s trying to shame the GOP publicly more than anything, because there’s not a whole lot else he can do.
And clearly, that’s working out so well for all of us.
Right now, people on the watch list are legally buying assault rifles. That tells me we need a better system. And that’s what the President is saying. I’m not sure why anyone, whatever their politics, would disagree with that.[/quote]
Right now, people on the watch list are people, not criminals. They get on the “watch list” after taking a trip to Turkey, or while writing a book about the CIA.
I also object to the concept of applying prior restraint to constitutional rights without individual judicial approval on a case-by-case basis. Not some nebulous “appeal” process after the right is denied, but rather a strict legal process before each individual citizen is listed in the first place.
