Jeff Flake: Take The Guns First, Then Do That "Due Process" Bother Later

I seem to remember some roarings about "authoritarianism" and "tyranny" when Trump said something like this (though he seems to have meant he supported the quickie gun violence restraining order type of law, with due process (though expedited), while awaiting a full trial for actual criminal charges.

But now that Jeff Flake proposes an actual abridgment of 2nd Amendment rights, stripping out due process protections, in legislative language and ready for turnkey authoritarianism, I imagine we'll be hearing a lot less about tyranny from the usual suspects.

This is what a real attack on American values looks like.

One day Sen. Jeff Flake is warning America about rising Stalinism and the next he's supporting a bill that strips the rights of citizens who've been arbitrarily placed on secret government lists without any probable cause or due process. Make no mistake, that's exactly what the legislation a group of senators plan to re-introduce this week does.

"Terrorists," explains Flake, "shouldn't have access to guns, and this legislation has the teeth to make sure they don't."

Hey, forget the guns! Why aren’t Flake and the Democrats introducing legislation to immediately detain all these "terrorists?" If the watch lists are enough to convict a man, then it’s safe to assume that there are over a million violent extremists walking our streets with impunity. Because surely -- surely --Flake, sainted martyr of real conservatism, a man who took an oath to "support and defend the Constitution," isn't arguing that we should circumvent the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments for those placed on extrajudicial lists by bureaucrats? Surely he's not arguing that simply being suspected of potentially engaging in criminal activity is now enough to preemptively deprive people of their rights? That would be downright authoritarian.

Watch lists are inexact tools for law enforcement, after all, not a way to adjudicate rights. Most of the names on the watch lists, and the reason those names appear on those lists, are known only to government officials....

I await the dire predictions of creeping tyranny from the "libertarian conservative" crowd.

I imagine I'll be a-waitin' for quite a while.

posted by Ace at 07:45 PM

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