Questioning New Standards for Civil Disobedience

[Purveyor]

Jun 9, 2015 10:42 AM EDT
By Cass R. Sunstein

Civil disobedience is an honorable American tradition. The Boston Tea Party helped spark the Revolutionary War, and during the 1960s civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated civil disobedience as “expressing the highest respect for law.” Invoking King’s idea (if not his name), prominent conservatives are now calling for new forms of disobedience. Some of their arguments are hard to accept, but they have a kind of internal logic, and they are resonating in influential circles.

Consider Charles Murray’s spirited new book, “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” which is rooted in an extraordinary claim: “America is no longer the land of the free.” The source of this unfreedom is not NSA surveillance, police misconduct or mass incarceration. It is the rise of the modern regulatory state, from the New Deal to the present, which has subordinated our founding commitment to freedom. “What made America unique first blurred, then faded, and today is almost gone,” Murray writes.

Chief culprits here include the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, which “has authority not just over workplaces but over every piece of property in the nation.” Offering numerous examples of federal overreaching, Murray argues for “systematic civil disobedience,” to be applied to the countless regulations that are “pointless, stupid and tyrannical.”

Murray calls for disobeying such regulations whenever “no harm has occurred.” To defend the disobedient, he calls for the creation of a privately funded Legal Services Corporation. Because the federal government has limited resources, Murray thinks that those who violate occupational safety and environmental regulations could end up a lot like those who drive over the speed limit. In practice, state troopers have to allow a lot of violations; Murray hopes that OSHA and EPA will, too.

Murray is unusual in asking for a large-scale social movement, but other conservatives have made narrower arguments for civil disobedience. With respect to a possible Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, former Governor Mike Huckabee has not been alone in expressing the hope that “somewhere there will be a governor who will simply say, ‘No, I’m not going to enforce’” the decision.

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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-09/questioning-new-standards-for-civil-disobedience

[starroute]

1. This is part of conservatives seeing themselves as a persecuted minority

Civil disobedience is the last tactic short of violence by which a disenfranchised minority can assert its rights. It was never meant to be used by elected officials or rich people who merely don't like the government telling them there are certain things they can't do.

There's also this: "Because the federal government has limited resources, Murray thinks that those who violate occupational safety and environmental regulations could end up a lot like those who drive over the speed limit. In practice, state troopers have to allow a lot of violations; Murray hopes that OSHA and EPA will, too."

So unlike the Raging Grannies who were just arrested in Seattle for locking themselves down in a protest of Shell's arctic drilling, these doofuses aren't even prepared to face arrest. They're hoping the EPA will be too underfunded by Congress to ever do anything about their blatant violations of law.