Lost right? - anti-government movement

National Review, July 10, 1995

IN Lost Rights James Bovard chronicled typical depredations of federal agencies. Each page represents an American who has faced a rigid, often unforgiving government, at a price in wealth or energy or freedom, or all three. Such encounters serve as a recruiting ground for the panoply of new-wave anti-government groups, from property-rights activists to the county movement in the West to a growing National Rifle Association.

It's no coincidence that as government has gotten bigger -- trying to do more for you by doing more to someone else -- so has the range and variety of its resisters. Along with the burgeoning government has come an expanded police power. Law enforcement no longer just means a cop walking the beat. It can mean someone from the Environmental Protection Agency checking to make sure you haven't built a new deck on supposed wetlands. It can mean someone from the Drug Enforcement Administration confiscating your house because a marijuana plant was found growing on the back forty. It can mean, as Charles Krauthammer recounted, an FBI agent asking you whether a former employee up for an Administration appointment ever cracked an ethnic joke. It can mean -- as we all know -- the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms barging into your house to investigate some suspected firearms irregularity. Hence, the increasingly uneasy relation between conservatives and law enforcement; it's difficult to support vigorous enforcement of laws that shouldn't be on the books in the first place. But there's a profound risk in seeming anti-law-enforcement in an American polity that rightly cherishes law and order. The risk is all the greater in the wake of Oklahoma City, which has shone the spotlight on a right-wing fringe -- the militias -- that seems willing to reject the most basic governmental authority. How should conservatives respond? First, by sticking to their principles. Central government has always posed the gravest threat to liberty, and as Angelo Codevilla points out (page 35), liberals bent on tarring the entire case for limited government with Oklahoma City are engaged in a sinister enterprise. If their logic is taken seriously, they are arguing for the criminalization of a philosophical position, while at the same time seeking to increase the power of the central government to move against it. Even in small doses, this medicine promises only unhappy effects. The best way to ensure respect for law enforcement, conservatives should insist, is to ensure it for laws. And that won't happen until there are fewer of them. As government has grown, people's respect for it has dwindled. In fact, it has become an object of fear. But all of this fades in the public mind when it sees law-enforcement agents confronting an armed band that has gunned down their colleagues. Whether the case involves David Koresh or Rodney King, officers who daily put their lives at risk should get the benefit of the doubt, regardless of the operational folly of their political bosses. For conservatives this means taking care about where to draw the line both in criticizing government and in making allies. Freshman Republican Steve Stockman clearly crossed it with his incendiary remarks about Waco and Janet Reno in Guns & Ammo. So did G. Gordon Liddy when he encouraged his listeners to expect federal agents to come busting down their doors. The NRA deserves the flak it has gotten for calling ATF agents jack-booted thugs. Finally, most militiamen might be weekend soldiers playing with guns, but others are paranoiacs who scramble their gun-toting friends at the first sighting of a U.S. military vehicle. These lapses on the Right should be criticized from the Right. So it was almost refreshing to hear Republican Peter King of New York (lifetime ACU rating: 87) say of the militias: ``They're wackos, they're nuts, they're dangerous, and we should have nothing to do with them.'' The pull of these two imperatives -- to limit government but not to stand in the way of legitimate law enforcement -- is being felt in Congress now over the anti-terrorism bill. The measure has passed the Senate and will soon be considered in the House. In a strange-bedfellow alliance, some conservatives are joining the ACLU in worrying about the civil-liberty implications of the bill. On the strict merits, as Eugene Methvin points out (p. 32), these concerns are excessive. One measure that has gotten particular attention is the so-called roving wire-tap, which would peg a wire-tap to a person no matter what phones he uses. But there is no reason to believe this authority would diminish Fourth Amendment protections; it is the individual who has the privacy right, after all, not the telephones. Also raising concerns are provisions allowing the military to assist in domestic cases involving biological or chemical weapons. But the military involvement would be strictly limited to technical assistance and analogous to the limited role it now plays in the drug war. This sounds merely prudent in a world of technological terrorists, foreign and domestic. Indeed, former Attorney General William Barr -- hardly a liberal -- calls the legislation ``balanced and reasonable.'' Still, given the expansive abuses that have occurred with well-meaning legislation like the RICO statutes -- originally meant to rein in mobsters, now brought to bear against targets as far-flung as abortion protestors -- conservative suspicion is reasonable. Indeed, the current IRS audit of the NRA looks suspiciously similar. Hence, it's difficult to cede any more power to a Federal Government one can't be sure will act within its given bounds. The short answer is to give law-enforcement agencies the powers they need to protect society while keeping a careful watch on them and investigating abuses like Waco as soon as they come to light. If this sounds ambiguous, well, conservatives are doomed to ambiguity on these issues until government is returned to its proper place, and law enforcement again means foiling criminals rather than harassing citizens.