Rand Paul’s plan to abolish the TSA
The Christian Science Monitor reports,
Forget the Fed, for now – Sen. Rand Paul wants to shut down the TSA.
The Kentucky Republican is drafting legislation to end the Transportation Safety Administration and to establish a passenger bill of rights, according to a spokesman from his office. When those bills hit, they’ll likely be accompanied by a deluge of signatures from a petition campaign launched by the Campaign for Liberty, the grassroots and lobbying organization once chaired by the senator’s father, Ron Paul. Paul stepped down from his honorary chairmanship to mount his presidential campaign.
Paul the elder, the Texas congressman and gadfly presidential candidate, is famous for his campaign to end the Federal Reserve along with five government departments – Education, Energy, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, and Commerce – and has long called for abolishing the TSA, too. (For a “big dog” take on Ron Paul’s proposed cuts, see this ad.)
Paul the younger’s petition to end the TSA cites several mortal sins for the agency:
- The TSA does not make us more secure; it simply wastes time and money.
- The TSA has set up rules and procedures that harass ordinary citizens at the expense of actually finding terrorists.
- Private security should handle airport checkpoints.
- Toddlers, mothers with small babies, grandparents, and the disabled are all being harassed while simply trying to board an airplane.
- Our constitutional rights are being violated every day by an out-of-control agency that was created in a misguided attempt to interject government into a place it was not needed.