Protests quickly broke out nationwide following the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, which was caught on video and quickly went viral.

Yes, Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder.

Yes, the usual “voices of reason” are issuing a new round of calls for “police reform,” just as they do after every police murder of an unarmed, non-violent civilian.

No, murder charges and “police reform” aren’t going to fix the problem. Long hot summer, here we come.

It’s tempting to believe that protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots can change police behavior, or perhaps that they COULD change that behavior if applied frequently and vigorously enough.

That kind of widespread delusion is, as Thoreau put it, “a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,” with predictable results.

If protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots followed every police murder of an unarmed, non-violent civilian, we wouldn’t see fewer police murders of unarmed, non-violent civilians. We’d just see bigger police overtime budgets.

The root of police violence isn’t racism, nor is it the presence of “a few bad apples” on police forces, nor is it the absence of sufficient safeguards such as body cameras and civilian review boards.

The root of police violence is the modern conception of policing itself: The creation of “police forces” as state institutions separate from the populace and dedicated to suppressing that populace on command.

“Police departments” as we know them were just coming into existence in England at the time the United States declared itself independent. They didn’t establish themselves in major American cities until the mid-19th century, or in smaller cities and towns until the 20th.

At one time, a handful of state and federal agencies, a sheriff in each county, and an ad hoc system of volunteer posses and local watchmen handled “law enforcement” in America.

Now more than 18,000 “law enforcement” organizations lord it over the American public, stealing their salaries from that public’s earnings, padding their budgets with literal highway robbery (“asset forfeiture” and so forth), and usually protected by “qualified immunity” when they kill.

If the goal is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” police as we know them are at best a failed experiment.

How do we wind that experiment down?

Step one would be ending qualified immunity and holding law enforcement personnel as responsible for their actions and as liable for the consequences of those actions as regular Americans are.

Steps two and three would be, respectively, standing down “police departments” entirely in favor of unpaid volunteers for most “law enforcement” duties, and ultimately abolishing the state itself.

Steps two and three, while inevitable in the long term, don’t seem very likely in the short term.

Step one, on the other hand, could be accomplished by Independence Day if the right incentives were applied.

Let’s give the politicians a choice: End qualified immunity or burn, baby, burn.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On May 28, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship.” From the title and the document respectively we can draw to two lessons.

First: Never, ever, ever believe the title of a government document. The internal texts of congressional bills and resolutions, as well as executive branch orders, “findings,” intelligence “estimates,” etc. seldom have much, if anything, to do with their titles.

“A Bill to Protect Cats, and for Other Purposes” may or may not even mention cats outside of its opening  justification paragraphs before it mutates into a swamp of of corporate welfare handouts, hidden tax increases, and Orwellian surveillance state provisions. An intelligence “estimate” or presidential “finding” that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction or that the Iranians are trying to build a nuclear weapon … well, you get how that stuff works, right?

Second: Never, ever, ever mention — at least in public — that Donald Trump is a liar. The purpose of the executive order is not to “prevent online censorship.” It’s to punish Twitter for “fact-checking” two of his tweets about voting by mail.

“Trump,” the “fact-check” title notes, “makes unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.” That’s an incredibly polite way of saying that Trump tells new stories so wildly incompatible with his previous tales that “Trump’s lying again” is the only plausible way to interpret them.

Until a few weeks ago, Trump and his party defended mail contact with voters as the only way to PREVENT voter fraud. Now Trump says “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.”

Stripped of its empty self-congratulation and whiny victim-playing, Trump’s executive order is about the opposite of protecting free speech. It’s about “clarifying” — that is, neutering — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Section 230 protects online platforms from liability for material created by others: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Section 230, to put it as simply as possible, allows online platforms to operate without fear of being sued into bankruptcy for the actions of their users. If I libel you on Twitter or Facebook, you can sue me, but if you try to sue them you’ll lose. They’re not responsible for what I write.

Section 230’s protections aren’t dependent on a platform “purport[ing] to provide users a forum for free and open speech,” or on that platform being truthful if it does make such a claim, as the executive order implies. Platforms are free to set their own content policies, to ban users who violate those policies, and to notice and publicly mention that a user is a pathological liar who’s lying yet again, even if that user just happens to be the president of the United States.

If it withstood court challenges (it wouldn’t), Trump’s order would use the rule-making and spending power of the federal bureaucracy to punish, not protect, free speech.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In mid-May, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution authorizing remote voting by proxy. Per the resolution, one congressperson may vote on behalf of up to ten others. In theory,  as few as 40 of the House’s 435 members could show up in Washington for the House to do business.

But Article I, Section 5 of the US Constitution says otherwise: “[A] Majority of each [house of Congress] shall constitute a Quorum to do Business.” That means 218 members must be present for the House to do anything.

As May draws to a close and the House Democratic majority prepares to race its shiny new unconstitutional proxy muscle car around the track, House Republicans are suing.

Their case seems air tight, but that doesn’t mean it will get anywhere. Federal courts, write Melanie Zanona, Heather Caygle, and Sarah Ferris at Politico, “are notoriously reluctant to wade into internal House machinations. …. often citing the Constitution’s language that declares that ‘[e]ach House may determine the rules of its proceedings.'” An obviously inapplicable excuse, true, but an available one.

There are other ways of putting the kibosh on the proxy scheme.

The Senate could simply refuse to  take up any legislation passed by the House without a quorum.

Likewise, President Trump could refuse to sign such legislation even if the Senate also passed it.

Better yet, the Senate and/or the president could decline to even acknowledge such legislation as having been passed by the House at all.

How many legs does a dog have if we call its tail a leg? Four — calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. Ditto bills supposedly passed by a House with no quorum present and therefore with no authority to pass anything at all.

Don’t count on any of those outcomes any more than on the courts, though. Expecting any branch of government to start obeying the Constitution is, as Samuel Johnson called the second marriage of a man unhappy in his first, “the triumph of hope over experience.”

As is depending on the Constitution itself. As 19th century American anarchist Lysander Spooner wrote of it, “this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.”

Neither Congress, nor the courts, nor the presidency, nor the Constitution will secure our rights for us. If we want them, we’re going to have to seize them for ourselves.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY