ACLU Hammers Obama's Attempt To Abuse The "No Fly" List

It doesn’t appear that lame duck Barack Obama has any allies left at all:

The No Fly List is in the news this week, just in time for the ACLU’s argument in federal court on Wednesday in its five-year-long challenge to the list’s redress process.

Last night, in response to last week’s tragic attack in San Bernardino, California, President Obama urged Congress to ensure that people on the No Fly List be prohibited from purchasing guns. Last week, Republicans in Congress defeated a proposal that would have done just that. “I think it’s very important to remember people have due process rights in this country, and we can’t have some government official just arbitrarily put them on a list,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said.

There is no constitutional bar to reasonable regulation of guns, and the No Fly List could serve as one tool for it, but only with major reform. As we will argue to a federal district court in Oregon this Wednesday, the standards for inclusion on the No Fly List are unconstitutionally vague, and innocent people are blacklisted without a fair process to correct government error. Our lawsuit seeks a meaningful opportunity for our clients to challenge their placement on the No Fly List because it is so error-prone and the consequences for their lives have been devastating.

Advertisement

More than half of the names placed on the “no fly” list should have never been there according to experts, including toddler, Rep. John Lewis, and former Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Amusingly, Kennedy may be the only person on the “no-fly”list who was actually affiliated with a terrorist group (the Irish Republican Army) and who killed someone (Mary Jo Kopechne).

Democrat lawmakers were attempting to use the much larger terror watch list instead of the more restrictive (if equally flawed) “no fly” list in order to deny citizens their gun rights, a list of nearly a million souls where close to 300,000 have no known ties to terror groups of any kind, and who have been placed on the list for arbitrary reasons or no reason at all.

This Democrat push to use lists to strip Americans of their core Constitutional rights without due process appears to be certain of defeat, but it will not the be the last.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member