Guilt by association can't be the basis of law

Next to watching the ocean liner Normandie burning on a Manhattan pier across the Hudson River, my most vivid memory of growing up in North Bergen, N.J., is the day the FBI raided the local butcher shop and arrested the portly owner because, my father said, “he delivered baloney to the Bund.â€

The German-American Bund was a pro-Nazi group that had five chapters in New Jersey, including one in North Bergen, which then had a significant German-American population. The Bund undoubtedly found the neighborhood butcher shop, known, for some reason, as “the pork store,†a convenient place to purchase baloney and bratwurst for the membership after a hard day of heiling Hitler just before World War II.

The butcher was questioned and released because engaging in commerce with a potential enemy was not a crime. I guess the incident was my introduction to guilt by association.

And guilt by association is probably why selling baloney to the Bund so long ago came to mind when Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Xenophobia) introduced legislation to strip away the citizenship of any America suspected or convicted of having ties to terrorists. Either suspected or convicted will do.

Forget about niceties like due process and innocent until proven guilty. We’re at war and it’s time to get tough on terrorism, even at the price of turning the Constitution on its head.

Lieberman argues that those who join groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban “join our enemy and should be denied the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship.â€

But, as Georgetown law professor David Cole pointed out in The Washington Post, the Lieberman-Brown bill would also deny citizenship to anyone accused of, but not necessarily convicted of, providing support to any group identified as terrorist by the State Department.

 A person could have his citizenship taken away for making a contribution or doing business with a terrorist organization and even for filing a friend of the court brief or writing an op-ed piece with or for such a group. Shades of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

To those who would argue that Cole is just another knee-jerk liberal law professor, I would offer the testimony of Mickey Edwards. Edwards, a former Republican House leader, a founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation and national chairman of the American Conservative Union, has written that Lieberman’s bill could strip away the citizenship of someone who worked with a terrorist organization to get it to renounce the use of violence or even someone who “contributes to a fund to repair a medical facility in Gaza.

“Can a conservative really go along with this?†Edwards asks. “With this ultimate empowerment of the state? With this acceptance of the infallibility of government and the unlimited power of government agents? Let us hope not. John Boehner, the quite conservative Republican leader in the United States House of Representatives, on hearing of Mr. Lieberman’s strange efforts, was quick to raise an alarm: Isn’t it unconstitutional?â€

Fortunately, it probably is.

In drafting the bill, Lieberman and Brown inadvertently or deliberately — you decide — overlooked two Supreme Court decisions that citizenship cannot be taken from individuals against their will, no matter what they do, up to including mass murder. The terrorist can be executed or sent to prison for life but, like any other native born or naturalized citizen, he remains a citizen unless he voluntarily waives his constitutional right to citizenship.

The Times Square bomber and other home-grown terrorists have prompted legislators to consider measures to tighten security and otherwise strengthen our anti-terrorism laws. But even if the Lieberman-Brown revocation of citizenship were constitutional, it is hard to imagine it doing any good or deterring any enemy. What terrorist would reconsider committing a violent act because it might cause him to lose his citizenship in a nation he despises?

Lieberman and his new friend Brown, with this meaningless bill designed to make them look tough on terrorism, are just delivering baloney.

 Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.