ANTI-METH ACT IMPINGES ON RIGHTS OF ALL AMERICANS

WASHINGTON — Capitol Hill politics is actually even more interesting than
the Sunday morning talk shows would have you believe. One popinjay shrieking
from the left and another from the right about last week’s headlines is not
the whole of Washington’s political dramas. Occasionally, American politics
is more complicated and more momentous.

The scheming and orating in Washington going on over a little-known
legislative monstrosity called the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act
would go down as an enormous bore on any Sunday morning talk show. Yet its
outcome is of vital importance to our freedoms as citizens, and its
opponents demonstrate that sometimes our elected officials do more than feel
our pain and kiss babies.

MAPA, if passed by Congress, would empower federal agents to search your
home and take your property without immediately informing you — possibly
without ever informing you. Naturally, it gives unscrupulous law-enforcement
officials opportunities to plant evidence or to spice it up pursuant to
getting an easy conviction.

The diversity of the political forces that have come together to oppose MAPA
constitutes politics at its most interesting and most serious — even more
serious than the soap opera between President Bill Clinton and his fabled
"Clinton-haters." The American Civil Liberties Union’s stalwart campaign
against MAPA is being aided and abetted by the liberal Democratic Rep.
Sheila Jackson-Lee and the conservative Republican Rep. Bob Barr.

According to the Department of Justice, methamphetamine is a brain buzzer
increasingly popular with young people. It is concocted in "meth labs"
throughout the country, and the department hopes its agents will suppress
the production and trafficking in meth with MAPA. The bill increases
criminal penalties for selling meth and appropriates funds for hunting down
and closing "meth labs." It also would appropriate funds for treatment of
the meth monsters. Slipped into this potpourri of good deeds unfortunately
are amendments that would allow agents to search homes, workplaces and
vehicles without informing their owners. The agents would also be able to
remove property without fully inventorying it. It could be months before the
inventories were submitted to property owners.

Former federal prosecutor Barr argues that these provisions "change present
laws regarding search warrants, loosening up the need to provide notice and
the requirement for inventories of property seized." He claims that these
insidious provisions would then be used by other law-enforcement agents for
a wider array of searches.

"Agents without search warrants could enter unoccupied houses and offices
and search, copy or seize information, even on computer hard drives," he
says.

Whether the liberal Democrat Jackson-Lee and the conservative Republican
Barr succeed in thwarting MAPA, this particular struggle on behalf of civil
liberties highlights a particularly menacing threat to civil liberties, Barr
says, given the present balance of power in Washington between Republicans
and Democrats.

Republicans are always strong law-and-order advocates. Despite the wide
streak of libertarianism in their ranks, they are suckers for FBI claims
that such instrumentalities as MAPA are necessary in the war against drugs
and terrorism. Democrats, whether soft on law and order or libertarian
regarding law enforcement, are easily manipulated by their guy in the White
House.

The consequence is that justice department officials intent on making their
job of apprehending criminals easier are having an easier time passing laws
that might make ordinary Americans’ lives less easy. Your security from a
rashly executed search warrant will be weakened by MAPA. If the feds
secretly enter your home rather than the home of the guy next door, who will
find out? If the guy next door is their target, lucky him. And whatever is
taken from which home, only the feds will know.

Yet an alliance of Republicans and Democrats might make all this happen. The
price of liberty is vigilance, as the Founding Fathers knew back in the good
old days.