Caught the last 20 minutes of this discussion this morning that was taped on December 14, 2004 - before the signing of the last "intelligence reform bill." Initially I was skeptical of anyone who is a commentator for Faux News but Judge Andrew Pl. Napolitano made a strong argument against the Patriotic Act and the reform bill that just passed the Congress.
Would love to discuss why the assertions made by Napolitano and Healy aren't being screamed about from the roof tops. According to these two guys there are whole sets of new horrors in the intelligence reform bill just passed and signed - including doing away with some of the sunset and safety provisions included in the first "Patriotic Act." Do our Congress people have any clue what they are signing anymore? Is their job to just rubber stamp anything the White House and the Attorney General send their way. Guess so. Anybody read the either or both of the books being discussed?
Is American Liberty Imperiled?BOOK FORUM
Tuesday, December 14, 2004 (
originally aired)
12:00 PM
Featuring Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, Fox News, and Author,
Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws (Nelson Books, 2004); Gene Healy, Senior Editor, Cato Institute, and Editor,
Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything (Cato Institute, 2004); and moderated by Tim Lynch, Director, Cato's Project on Criminal Justice
See the full video or hear the audio of the tape at:
http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=1774If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, then it is necessary to take a step back from the transient issues of the day, which so often transfix our capital city, and assess the state of liberty in America. According to two new books, liberty in America has been under a relentless, though often subtle, assault.
In Constitutional Chaos, Judge Andrew Napolitano maintains that most Americans take their constitutional rights and liberties for granted and are largely ignorant of how the government breaks its own laws and gets away with it.
In Go Directly to Jail, Cato Institute senior editor Gene Healy shows how the government has been criminalizing more and more citizen conduct. With more than 4,000 federal offenses on the statute books and thousands more buried in the Code of Federal Regulations, Healy points out that there are good reasons to be alarmed by the government’s perfectly “legal” restrictions, investigations, and prosecutions. Please join us for a discussion of these disturbing trends and what might be done about them.