A few tawdry observers have questioned why Congress should be pouring millions of dollars into militarizing and nationalizing the Capitol Police Department. These observers unquestionably pose a serious threat to national security, and should be silenced at all costs, but since the question has entered into the sphere of public consciousness it deserves to be answered in the strongest possible terms.
It has been suggested, by ill informed and nefarious actors, that the scope of responsibilities envisioned for the Capitol police department would better fall under the purview of the FBI. Such an argument rest on flimsy technical issues, not the reality presented by securing an entire country. These individuals have expressed concern that the Police are unilaterally expanding their jurisdiction, and putting the capital city under a constant state of military surveillance, such as was used in Afghanistan to stunningly great effect.
Those who see things in these terms suffer from a delusional, and dangerous, understanding of what freedom really is. They believe that freedom means that the citizens of a country should be free to do whatever they want. In reality freedom means exactly the opposite; it means that the government should be free to do whatever it wants.
The real threat to freedom in a functioning democracy comes when the people have the audacity to tell the government what it can and cannot do. All governments, but especially those governments which rely on the manufactured consent of the governed, must maintain constant vigilance against any infringements on its freedoms and liberties.
The first step in safeguarding these liberties is to ensure that all proper intelligence is gathered on the public enemies who would seek to undermine it. It is impossible to ascertain who in the public is an enemy, without first gathering all possible data through which we could ascertain the thoughts and feelings which run through the hearts and minds of those individuals who make up the public. Once this data is gathered we can safely delineate the enemies from the non-enemies. In the interest of liberty, all members of the public should be treated as enemies until that judgment has been made.
This is just logical commonsense, plain to all rational observers. But the Capitol Police Police Department, in particular, plays an important role in securing our liberties. Due to arcane legal issues, the Capitol Police Department is the only federally associated law enforcement agency which is not subject to reporting under the Freedom of Information Act, sometimes known as FOIA.
FOIA is a blatant example of an infringement on governmental liberty, designed to make the government transparent to the very public which it is attempting to protect against! The fact that organizations such as the FBI and CIA are subject to such an abomination is outrageous, but the freedom which the Capitol Police Department has from this constraint offers a true point of brightness. the fact that we may be in the process of building an federal law enforcement agency which is not subjected to the onerous obligation of exposing its inner working to the public enemies is truly a cause for hope.
For too long we have allowed the freedom of our government to be curtailed by nefarious and ill-meaning actors. It is time for those who value freedom to stand together, united in the understanding that creeping government bureaucracies not only safeguard liberty and freedom, but are among the purest manifestations of those values.
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