Blog Jones

UPDATE: As often happens when I don’t take the time to investigate properly, I probably overstated the case. My bad. Eugene Volokh points out why.

It’s still pretty unsettling, but not quite the civil rights violation I thought.
–
One of the key principles of our government is that all citizens have the right to know what laws apply to them. How else can you have due process of the law?

How can you say “ignorance of the law is no excuse” when the government deliberately hides the law from you?

Apparently, however, there are in the United States of America secret laws.

According to Kevin Drum, “John Gilmore is suing the government because he doesn’t think he should be required to show ID before boarding a commercial flight.” The law that requires this action is one of these “secret laws.”

Quoting News.com:

The Bush administration…claims that the ID requirement is necessary for security but has refused to identify any actual regulation requiring it.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration’s defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.

“How do we know there’s an order?” Judge Thomas Nelson asked. “Because you said there was?”

….The Justice Department has said it could identify the secret law under seal, which would be available to the 9th Circuit but not necessarily Gilmore’s lawyers. But any public description would not be permitted, the department said.

Excuse me?

The Justice Department is preventing the public from knowing what the laws are? Furthermore, it’s preventing Gilmore from defending himself by preventing his lawyers from knowing what law he may or may not have violated?

And this is coming from the “Justice” Department?

What other “secret laws” are we under? Am I going to go to jail for violating a “secret law”? Perhaps put there by secret police and tried in a secret court using secret evidence?

Are you sure this is still the freest nation on earth?

Let’s hope that the courts rule this unconstitutional. If they fail, my confidence in the American justice system will be severely shaken.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 10:08 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.