Why Has Congress Militarized the Bureaucrats?
By
<http://blog.independent.org/author/cclose/>Carl
Close | Wednesday April 17, 2013 at 5:14 PM PDT
The war on drugs and the war on terrorism, I
noted in
<http://blog.independent.org/2013/03/27/why-are-cops-acting-like-soldiers/>a
recent Beacon
<http://blog.independent.org/2013/03/27/why-are-cops-acting-like-soldiers/>post,
have fostered a crisis mentality that has eroded
traditional constraints on domestic law
enforcement. The new zeitgeist has resulted in
police departments increasingly using “no knock”
raids and other military-type tactics formerly considered off-limits to them.
But other factors have also contributed to the
growing use of paramilitary operations at home.
In
<http://www.executivebranchproject.com/overcriminalization-and-law-enforcement-theatricality-engender-disrespect-for-our-criminal-justice-system/>a
piece at Executive Branch Review (a new blog
affiliated with the Federalist Society), former
prosecutor
<http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/author/john-g-malcolm>John
Malcolm blames Congress for helping to militarize
federal regulatory agencies. Lawmakers are at
fault, he argues, for passing vague statutes that
have given regulators enormous power and
discretion to enforce countless obscure
regulations that many of the accused didn’t even know were on the books.
The militarization of federal regulatory agencies
has led to numerous absurdities, including the following:
* In 2011, armed agents from the Fish and
Wildlife Service raided two Gibson Guitar
factories, in Memphis and Nashville, Tenn.,
believed to have been illegally using raw ebony imported from India.
* Also in 2011, a SWAT team from the
Department of Education raided a home in
Stockton, Calif., and pounced on its resident,
Kenneth Wright. (Wright’s estranged wife, who had
moved out a year earlier, was under investigation for financial aid fraud.)
* In 2010, SWAT agents from the Food and Drug
Administration raided a commercial dairy farm in
Lancaster, Penn., for selling unpasteurized milk
to willing customers across state lines.
(For details on these and other examples of
militarized regulatory enforcement, see
<http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340268/and-your-little-dog-too-deroy-murdock>this
recent piece from Deroy Murdock at National Review Online.)
Malcolm worries that incidents of “enforcement
overkill” are eroding the public’s faith in the
fairness and integrity of the nation’s legal
institutions. “When [prosecutors and federal
agents] engage in unnecessary theatrics or
prosecute otherwise law-abiding people for
‘crimes’ that no reasonable person would have
known was a crime,” he writes, “they (no doubt,
unwittingly too) do more harm than good.”
Perhaps lawmakers will come to realize that they
should deal with another problem facing the
nation: the crisis of confidence in the justice
systema crisis of their own making.
http://blog.independent.org/2013/04/17/why-has-congress-militarized-the-bureaucrats/
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