Are Republicans doing a David Davis?

One of the more amusing episodes to come out of the appalling assault on air travellers’ rights in the US was the Transportation Security Administration’s counter-proposal.
They offered to demonstrate the sexually-explicit ‘pat-down’ technique on any legislator. Some, after all, don’t have to undergo them. I don’t know about you, but if I were a seventy-year-old Senator, I wouldn’t be too keen on a TSA officer giving me the grope.
Far from just being personally offensive to America’s ageing statesmen, it’s taken on a party-political aspect. Now, it’s Republicans arguing we’ve given up too much of our liberty for little security. As unbelievable as that may be. Republican congressman John Mica co-created the TSA – he now regrets it. So too do Senator George LeMieux and Senator-elect Rand Paul, Jimmy Duncan, and a host of other Republican representatives. Ever at the barricades, Ron Paul has proposed an ‘American Traveler Dignity Act’: banning federal agents from being more… ‘intimate’ than any of us can.
David Davis’s resignation ignited and united a hesitant Conservative grassroots against intrusion into our private lives here. So, too, might these few incidents move the great unreconstructed Republicans in the right direction. As Dan recognised last month, there’s a long way to go. It’s the same Republican Party that worships the Patriot Act [sic.]. They introduced electronic surveillance without a warrant. They started whaling on air passengers in the first place. They are second-to-none in the fear-mongering stakes.
But on this small piece of turf, at airports across the nation, Republicans are fighting to keep the government’s hands off your junk. And if they can, how could a Conservative-Lib Dem government not over here?
By Oliver Cooper.
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