Senator Biden Attaches Hated RAVE Act to Popular New Amber Alert Bill
BBSNews - 2003-05-01 -- By Ethan Straffin - So, Bush signed most of the provisions of the original RAVE Act into law
yesterday, as Congress applauded and defenders of civil liberties wept.
Just to add insult to Constitutional injury, Senator Joe Biden (D-DL) spent
part of his moment in the sun attacking the Drug Policy Alliance
(www.drugpolicy.org) on the Senate floor. (Funny how he steered clear of
launching similar verbal assaults against the ACLU, or any of the other more
"reputable" organizations that fought him tooth and nail.) Biden angrily
cited "fierce resistance" and "serious grass-roots opposition" as reasons
that he was ultimately forced to attach his provisions as riders to popular
(yet entirely unrelated) legislation in order to ramrod them through Congress
with no floor debate whatsoever. Ah, the democratic -- or at least
Democratic -- process in action!
http://www.drugpolicy.org/communities/raveact/
In light of this development, I simply must ask: doesn't it strike anyone
else as surreal that the Democratic Party has let one of its own go
unchallenged in launching a major assault on youth culture? What savvy
Republican talked the DNC into this? How can Democrats even dream that
Biden's actions will gain them more votes than are lost to future Green or
Libertarian defectors within Generations X and Y? This is supposed to help
the Democrats' desperately-needed rebuilding efforts, how, exactly?
Not that I'm entirely disheartened. Just as Rep. Mark Souder's (R-IA)
drug-related amendments to the Higher Education Act led directly to the
founding of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (www.ssdp.org), Biden is about
to reap the whirlwind of outrage that will begin to build just as soon as
that fateful first rave, concert, or (let's just hope) Democratic fundraiser
is shut down by the feds because The Organizers Should Have Known That There
Might Be Drugs There.
And if a few more conservatives also wake up and notice -- as the editors of
the National Review did many years ago -- that our draconian drug laws are
being used to advance the implementation of the very big-government police
state that so many Republicans claim to oppose? So much the better.
###
Ethan Straffin is a dedicated drug policy reform activist, email him here.
Michael Hess is the Editor of BBSNews in Charlotte, NC. Write to the editor here. Not all submissions are published. Or visit the completely new BBSNews Blog and Forum on our front page - Please Participate in BBSNews!
|
