Due process in the age of Obama’s IRS
Arguments against banning gun purchases by people whose names are placed on secretive government lists are largely and correctly based on a denial of constitutional due process, as at American Thinker here and here. There is another compelling reason to oppose what has been referred to as “No Fly, No Buy” and similar proposed regulations: politically motivated abuse.
President Nixon attempted to weaponize the IRS against his perceived political enemies but was rebuffed. Even though he was unsuccessful in that, the attempt alone resulted in this becoming the 2nd Article of Impeachment against him:
He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
That was then! In the Age of Obama and Lois Lerner, the IRS was successfully weaponized against the Tea Party and similar conservative/libertarian citizens’ organizations, particularly by “tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”
The Tea Party and similar groups were also routinely accused of being dangerous and violent by Democrats and their media allies, although virtually every act of violence at their events was committed by leftists and anarchists against the conservative and libertarian Tea Partiers. That contrasts with the whitewashing by much of the media and Democratic Party of the actual violence committed by Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
At TaxProfBlog, Professor Paul Caron of Pepperdine University School of Law is up to The IRS Scandal, Day 1139 without anyone in the Obama government answering for criminal actions against citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
So if citizens are prevented from exercising a constitutional right, whether by legislation or, as often the case with this president, executive fiat, by having their names placed on a secret government list, is it remotely unreasonable to expect that political motivations (and to the left, politics motivates everything!) will result in various conservatives and libertarians being placed on that list? One need not break a sweat to find those on the left claiming that a terrorism threat equal to or greater than that from jihadism is from right-wing anti-government types. To many on the left, the concept of limited government, as it is enshrined in the Constitution, is anti-government!
From a civic order standpoint, it is hard to imagine something more dangerous than law-abiding citizens who are 2nd Amendment supporters; limited government or border enforcement advocates; or, given current leftist proclivities, even anthropogenic global warming deniers, finding their right to purchase a firearm blocked by something done in secret by their government.