CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

Keep America Safe: Right Wing Fanatics Attack Lawyers, Constitution, and Fundamental Right to Legal Representation

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

Every major movement or cause throughout this nation’s history which sought constitutional protections for those the government had denied, from racial minorities ostracized by segregationists laws to those persecuted for their religious beliefs, was led by lawyers. Our fundamental notions of social justice, which are grounded in this nation’s Bill of Rights and in Federal and state constitutions form the original colonies, exist because of the courage of lawyers to form, frame and preserve those notions. Lawyers have always borne the brunt of criticism from political conservatives who really believe in many respects that our government should be run as a totalitarian state like fascism. We saw this tragic reality when the Klu Klux Klan was once one of the most powerful political forces in this country, when McCarthyism’s “guilt by association” became the rule of law, and when segregationists labeled civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King “agents of communism.” It was lawyers who led the way in bringing about an end to the underlying fanatical political ideology that created and sustained the government-sponsored repression of social justice during each of these dark moments in our nation’s history.

This repressive McCarthyism-like political ideology has once again reared its ugly head. This time the charge is being led by a conservative political group called Keep America Safe. The target of the group’s anti-Democratic efforts are lawyers who represent suspected terrorists, and in particular government lawyers who, as the New York Times reported in a March 9, 2010 article by John Schwartz, “worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.”

Keep America Safe is led by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former White House Vice-President Dick Cheney who has repeatedly expressed his disdain for anyone who believes terror suspects enjoy “rights.” Keep America Safe earlier this month released a video that questioned the loyalty of a number of U.S. Justice Department lawyers in the Obama administration who have represented Guantanamo Bay prison detainees before the courts.

The Keep America Safe video is so far out there in McCarthyism’s lunatic right fringe that even some traditional mainstream conservative political groups, like the Federalist Society, have rebuked it on the fundamental constitutional principle that even the most unpopular individual charged with an offense against the laws of this country has a right to a lawyer. Perhaps Liz Cheney was buoyed by the recent stunning upset election of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown who made the “war on terror” the central feature of his campaign with rhetoric like the government should not be “wasting” money providing lawyers to terrorists. We suspect Ms. Cheney and Keep America Safe wanted to curry favor with those elements of the Tea Party movement who regularly show up at rallies dressed in revolutionary war garb waving signs proclaiming the government has been taken over by socialists.

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