Tucson, Arizona Saturday, 4 January 2003
By Harry Rosenfeld
The Bush administration asserts full executive powers to ward off terrorism at home while it diminishes the reach of federal regulatory agencies whose job it is to protect the public against dangers or abuses.
Those are the two faces created by an administration looking, like the Roman god Janus, in opposite ways at the same time.
One face requires the ideology of its right-wing, small-government-is-better base; the other face looks to deploy more government more intrusively to forestall domestic terrorism.
Republicans display little if any embarrassment as they straddle these antipathetic
philosophies.
It is that lack of reflective consciousness that should alarm those cherishing
the nation's liberties.
News accounts report almost daily on the breakup of an al-Qaida cell or a related Islamic terrorist group around the world or in the United States.
The threat of terrorism is real. Expansive powers voted in the USA Patriot Act and the law setting up the Department of Homeland Security undoubtedly are needed to confront real and present dangers.
Yet those powers involve intrusions on privacy and come close to impinging on civil rights. In the wrong hands, they easily and routinely would.
All the more reason, then, to have executives in place who are imbued with sensitivity to possibilities of undermining constitutional protections that lurk in the new legislation.
Logically, you would think, the more conservative the executive, the more innately suspicious should he or she be about the application of enlarged authority.
But that is not the way it is working out. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who likely is most to the right in the Bush Cabinet, is rushing to grasp his newly bestowed prerogatives to his bosom.
Inspecting various personal records and communication plausibly might be required tools to hunt terrorists crafty at hiding themselves among the innocent population.
But these investigations must be conducted with a special fastidiousness so that law enforcement remains on the correct side of the fine line dividing the absolutely necessary from abusive excesses.
A recent example is the government requirement that students from countries with ties to terror be actually enrolled and fulfilling their academic requirements.
It makes sense. But locking up a kid who is one credit hour shy of his obligation is going too far. This may involve legal resident aliens, not citizens, but they are covered by a variety of constitutional protections.
And citizens should be concerned about what message this overreaching sends them.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Bush administration is curtailing government regulation of the industries that produce acid rain and despoil much of the landscape.
The Food and Drug Administration, which is supposed to guarantee the safety of the food supply, seemed to have been looking the other way when a big producer of chicken products kept unsanitary facilities suspected of contributing to an outbreak of listeria that killed eight people.
The Federal Aviation Administration, charged with providing for the safety performance of the industry, was found to have played a role in the crash of an Alaska Airlines jet that killed 88 people.
The FAA came in for blame because it allowed the airline a longer time to do its necessary maintenance on the aircraft.
At the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was chartered to protect the investing public, the appointment of a highly qualified overseer for the misbehaving accounting industry was blocked by its chairman, who has since resigned.
Such gamesmanship undoubtedly contributes to the abiding shakiness of the stock markets that are still seen as too hospitable to illegal or unethical manipulation.
Would that some of the abundant zeal of the anti-terror campaign found its way into the regulatory agencies. Both undertakings would be measurably improved.
* Harry Rosenfeld writes for the Times Union, Box 15000, News Plaza, Albany,
NY 12211; e-mail: hrosenfeld@timesunion.com.