Assemblyman Todd Spitzer and the fires

Assemblyman Todd Spitzer has done what a legislator is supposed to do: Scream for help for his district when it’s burning down. His calls for more action probably got more firefighting in his area. He wrote Steven Greenhut at The Orange County Register:

MY DISTRICT IS ON FIRE, PEOPLE HAVE LOST THEIR HOMES, BEEN EVACUATED AND IT IS NOW INTO THE CLEVELAND PUSHING INTO MY DISTRICT ON THE OTHER SIDE (RIVERSIDE COUNTY) AND I AM SUPPOSED TO SIT SILENT….HOW DO YOU THINK WE FINALLY GOT AIR SUPPORT INTO PORTOLA HILLS ON TUESDAY MORNING? BECAUSE THE OCFA AND I WERE QUIET? OH PLEASE.

This is one case where it looks like his grandstanding, usually excessive, paid off.

But when the fires have all been put out and he’s relaxing with a martini or Coke, he might think about how government inevitably is incompetent, often alarmingly so. Then he might think about how that incompetence also applies to his favorite government activity, law enforcement.

Spitzer has been a deputy district attorney in Orange County and a reserve officer in the LAPD. He’s seen law enforcement nab criminals and put them in prison.

He also has supported the lavish perks and pensions going to law enforcement and other government workers, as Greenhut details in a blog today:

Spitzer is a close ally of public employee unions, someone who has staked his political future on that association, given that he wants to be district attorney. He has led the charge for more spending on benefits on public safety positions. As one official asked me, “What’s he done for cutting costs? What does he want, a tax increase?”

But there’s another side of law enforcement that demands strong protections of citizens’ rights and comprehensive oversight. Recent incidents include the needless killing of poor Ashley MacDonald, a troubled teenager, by the Huntington Beach police; the effective execution of Don Scott on his ranch, by five government agencies, because the government coveted his land (here’s D.A. Michael Bradbury’s official report); the killing of Randy Weaver’s wife and son; and the massacre of the Branch Davidians in their church by Bill and Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno.

If government isn’t controlled — held down by the shackels of the Constitution and our traditional rights inherited from English Common Law — the government itself becomes a lawless, armed, ravaging horde. Former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts has written about how far down the road America has gone in becoming a police state.

Republicans once espoused Ronald Reagan’s principle, from his First Inaugural Address, that “Government isn’t the solution. Government is the problem.” Unfortunately, when it comes to “law enforcement,” nowadays Republicans all too often take the opposition position — that we need more laws, more cops, more prisons.

Ironically, Republicans now seem to be in the role of enforcing the Democrats’ enactment of “a multitude of New Offices,” which leads to “swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance,” as our Declaration of Independence put it.

Democratic legislators are those kind folks “protecting” us, while Republicans take up the nasty duty of cracking heads to enforce the Democrats’ laws. An especially Stalinist example is the recent passage in California of a bill banning smoking in cars if children are present. A Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill; and the law will be enforced by all the new cops Republican legislators want.

It’s bills like these — and there are thousands of them, from the wrongly named and unconstitutional “USA Patriot Act” on down — that are turning our country into a nation of Pavlik Morozovs, the (possibly mythical) Russian boy who snitched on his parents in the Soviet Union, saw them sent to prison, and became the poster boy for Stalin’s repression.

America should be different. America is based on liberty, that we take the risk of having too little security because having too much security means we’re no longer free.

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