Where Are the Liberals?

...It would be equally ironic if, in the name of combating crime, we were to commit the ultimate crime of establishing a police state...

...Authorize Federal grand juries to issue public reports recommending the removal of officials for misconduct or misfeasance, even in the absence of evidence sufficient to justify an indictment...

...It makes it possible, as Representative Louis Stokes, Ohio Democrat, pointed out, to bar a worker from defense employment "because he took part in peaceful picketing of a chemical company in protest of its manufacture of napalm...

...The Republican Administration and the Democratic Congress have been busy, these first few months of 1970, in lending more than a measure of plausibility to Mr...

...The liberals, with few exceptions, seem to have decided that this is a time to lie low...

...The Senate compounded its crime against democracy a few days later by giving unanimous approval to a "drug control" bill containing authorization for police officers to barge into any premises without warning if a judge has been persuaded that such a warning would result in the destruction of evidence...

...This, after all, is the thrust of President Nixon's proclaimed intention to "balance" the Court—to shift its weight away from a preoccupation with constitutional guarantees that get in the way of "law and order...

...They will soon get worse," Mr...

...51 Reverse a Supreme Court ruling-permitting defendants to inspect the transcripts of illegal Government wiretaps from which evidence might have been obtained...

...Some Senators who saw political expediency in voting for both the crime and drug bills are counting on the House to delete the more offensive sections of the legislation, but this, as Mr...

...Each time a crime bill is passed, it is with the feverish cry that it is necessary in order to cut down the crime rate, yet the crime rate continues to increase inexorably...

...Where a judge refused to avail himself of the opportunity to impose such a sentence, the Government would have the right to appeal to seek imposition of a more severe penalty...

...f Create a new, vaguely defined category of "dangerous special offenders," including persons who have been convicted once of taking part in a "conspiracy," and subject them to arbitrary sentences of up to thirty years...

...A few Senators—among them Democrats Sam Ervin of North Carolina, Philip Hart of Michigan, and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Republican Charles E. Goodell of New York—tried unsuccessfully to temper some of the crime bill's more vicious provisions...

...The vote on passage was seventy-three to one...

...After a five-year interval, the fruit of any illegal search and seizure would be available for unchallenged use as evidence...

...Shirer's ominous warning...

...The Phony War on Crime The Administration's major response to crime is to undercut constitutional protections...

...What is most dismaying in all of this is the apparent acquiescence or intimidation of many who should be leading the resistance...

...Where were all the "liberals...

...At some point, one would think that the American public would learn what a phony cry this is—that increasing the powers of the police has absolutely no effect on the crime rate and may very well develop more resentment in the high-crime areas of our urban centers...

...The "crime control" bill passed by the Senate late in January probably contains the most concentrated attack oh constitutional principles since the Alien and Sedition Acts...

...Speiser predicted in the ACLU's recent biennial report...

...Once again Senator Ervin— whose considerable knowledge of the law has all too often been deployed in the cause of preserving racism—battled valiantly against a patent violation of due process...

...Lawrence Speiser, Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in the ACLU's biennial report, February 1970...

...It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties—the freedom of association—which makes the defense of the nation worthwhile...

...Wicker has pointed out, "is a thin reed to lean upon...

...Exploiting to the extreme the widespread (and understandable) public concern about rising crime rates, playing on the profound aversion of many "middle Americans" to the manifestations of radical dissent, taking the fullest advantage of an apparent national craving for "law and order," political opportunists of both parties have mounted a massive ass ult on the protections of due process and the provisions of the Bill of Rights...

...We spend only five per cent on those items—the other ninety-five per cent is spent simply for keeping people in custody...

...In many of these steps the Senate— regarded by common consensus as the more "liberal" body—is leading the way...

...Perhaps all are depending—as they have depended in the past—on the Supreme Court to pull their chestnuts out of the fire in a year or two...

...It gives the President sweeping power to order investigations of persons or organizations, whether or not they are under consideration for access to security material...

...A recalcitrant witness, although convicted of no crime, could be summarily jailed without bail until he agreed to testify...

...But when the final vote was tallied, only one man—Democratic Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana—was sufficiently perturbed by constitutional questions to oppose the bill...

...Things could be worse...

...Since the first of the year, Congress—with the full encouragement and support of the Administration—has taken several long steps toward the abyss of totalitarianism...

...The organized bar has been silent...

...If it is approved by the House and signed into law by the President, it will at one stroke: % Undermine the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination by instructing the courts, on request of Government prosecutors, to force reluctant witnesses to testify in return for immunity not against prosecution but only against use of the compulsory testimony as evidence...

...Limit to five years the period during which such illegal evidence would be barred from use in the courts...

...why should the House be more courageous than the Senate...

...The Democrats have, for the most part, joined with the Republicans in a stampede toward repression...

...For all the attention focused on giving the police the right to make no-knock entries or general searches, or wiping out the privilege against self-incrimination, none of these would have as much impact on the crime rate as drastically increasing the amount of money for rehabilitation and job training in prisons...

...Lawrence Speiser, the Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote to members of the House that "it is time that Congress ceased to view Supreme Court decisions protecting constitutional rights of American citizens as the actions of an enemy institution...

...The anti-crime bills are really frauds...

...It is a good thing that neither the Bill of Rights nor the Magna Carta is the pending business of the Senate these days," Tom Wicker recently observed in The New York Times...

...William L. Shirer, who chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany and the collapse of the Third Republic in France, recently remarked that the United States "may be the first country to go fascist democratically...

...Indeed the House has made its own substantial contribution to the new climate of repression by giving overwhelming approval to a shabby piece of neo-McCarthyite legislation grandiosely called the Defense Facilities and Industrial Security Act of 1970...

...But in a year or two, when some of today's regressions may reach the Supreme Court for constitutional adjudication, the high tribunal is likely to be in no mood for focusing on libertarian niceties...

...If either were to be presented to the world's greatest deliberative body, in its present mood of political panic and myopia, it would undoubtedly be voted down as a needless restraint in the war on crime...

...The measure is the first legislative product of the Committee on Un-American Activities since its recent metamorphosis into the Internal Security Committee, and it demonstrates once again why the Committee should long ago have been abolished...

...Like the Senate's crime bill, the House security measure has as its prime purpose the reversal of Supreme Court decisions affirming the rights of individuals confronted by unfair and capricious Governmental procedures...

...His attempt to strike the "no-knock" provision from the bill was rejected by a vote of fifty to thirty-five...

...The bill empowers the Secretary of Defense to decide arbitrarily who can be employed by any defense project or facility, regardless of whether classified information is involved...

...But when Representative Bob Eckhardt, Texas Democrat, attempted to introduce at least a measure of due process into the security bill, scarcely a tenth of the House membership turned out to vote him down, twenty-seven to thirteen, and the vote on final passage was two hundred seventy-four to sixty-five...

...Upholding the rights of American citizens is something to be applauded, not deplored...

...The time to mobilize in defense of civil liberties is now, before the country has gone fascist democratically...

...In one of the decisions Congress is now attempting to circumvent, the Warren Court declared: "For almost two centuries, our country has taken singular pride in its Constitution, and the most cherished of those ideals have found expression in the First Amendment...

...Where were all the "liberals...