CLOSING RANKS ON MAPA

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 now going on over a little-known
legislative monstrosity called the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act
(MAPA) 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 constitute politics at its most interesting and most serious - even
more serious that the soap opera between 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 Rep. Sheila
Jackson-Lee, Texas Democrat, and the conservative Rep. Bob Barr, Georgia
Republican.

According to the Justice Department, methamphetamine is a brain buzzer
increasingly popular with young people. It is concocted in "meth labs"
throughout the country, and Justice hopes its agents will suppress the
production and trafficking in "meth" with MAPA. The bill increases criminal
penalties 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 Mr. Barr argues 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 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."

Whether the liberal Democrat Mrs. Jackson-Lee and the conservative
Republican Mr. Barr succeed in thwarting MAPA, this particular struggle on
behalf of civil liberties highlights a particularly menacing threat to
civil liberties, Mr. 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 may 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 may make all this happen. The
price of liberty is vigilance, as the Founding Fathers knew back in the
good old days..

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is the editor in chief of the American Spectator.