Should Democrats Be Attacking The Fifth Amendment Right Now?

by: Bob Owens
How would you like to be stripped of your civil rights for accidentally attempting to book a flight with an expired credit card, or for using two different travel web sites at the same time to see who has the cheapest hotels, or merely sharing a name with someone you’ve never met, or having a crazy relative, or for writing an article some anonymous bureaucrat didn’t like?
All of these are actual reasons American citizens have placed on one of the so-called “terror watch lists,” a series of databases ripped by the American Civil Liberties Union as, “error-prone and unreliable because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.”

Senate Democrats attempted to ram through a bill Monday night which would have stripped you of your right to buy a firearm to defend your family if you ended up on one of these lists, which you also end up on for working with or living near someone who also popped up on the list for no apparent reason at all.
The watch list system is so arbitrary, broken, and pointless that 40% of the people on it have no ties to terrorism at all and no one seems to know how they got there. It’s tempting to wonder if this is nothing more a Stalinist government enemies list… and that should terrify every American citizen, regardless of your political beliefs.

Even reliably leftist, pro-gun control Gawker ripped the watch list system as a complete train wreck.

The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, forty percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence.

Yesterday a handful of the most radical Democrat politicians conducted a “sit-in” in the House of Representatives, chanting “no bill, no break,” as they called for the House to vote on a bill to strip the civil rights of watch-listed citizens who have never committed a crime.
It was deplorable to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth as these vipers attempted to justify an assault on the Second, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

At the same time these Democrats were screaming to skewer your Constitutional rights, their party’s presidential contender Hillary Clinton was sweating it out as her IT specialist invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 125 times during a civil deposition about Mrs. Clinton’s email server in a case running parallel to the FBI’s criminal investigation.
Clinton herself has screamed that those Americans arbitrarily placed on watch lists should be stripped of their due process rights as a way of targeting the gun rights of American citizens, but I don’t think she’s thought things through very well in her support on stripping away their due process rights as well.

At this very moment, numerous Clinton confidants, friends, allies, and State Department employees are protected by due process, particularly their Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to not be be compelled to testify against themselves.
As then-Secretary Clinton clearly broken federal felony espionage laws in setting up her private email server—one apparently easily hacked by almost every enemy and allied government on the planet—she may want to reconsider her position before she and they end up living out the rest of their days in a federal prison.