The FBI's terrorist watch list designates those "known or appropriately suspected to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism."
And yesterday, the House judiciary committee, in a party-line vote, re-approved -- by defeating a Democratic amendment to the Patriot Act to ban these sales -- the sale of firearms to those on the list.
It's acceptable, according to the committee's libertarian Republicans, for government to expand, say, its powers of "record searches," "secret searches," "intelligence searches" and "'trap and trace' searches" under the Patriot Act; and, in a pinch, it might well be. True, none of those expansions conforms impeccably with small-government restraint and strict Constitutional constructionism; but maybe, just maybe a few, narrowly circumscribed, time-limited exceptions would help battle the bad guys -- even if, it certainly can be argued, the expansions run somewhat afoul of the Bill of Rights.
But to libertarian Republicans they're game, all the Amendments among the Bill of Rights -- except one, which is to say, Two. Libertarian, Constitution-loving, Founders-embracing Republicans indeed embrace the Founders and love the Constitution and are impeccably libertarian as long as the Constitution is interpreted chiefly as a kind of armed fortress to protect only their interpretation of the Second Amendment, which in itself is an extraordinarily dubious interpretation. Nevertheless, other Amendments are negotiable, reviewable, tweakable, impure, at times suspect -- even those outside the Bill of Rights, all the way to #14 -- and subject to statutory refinement.
So here we have it: the modern definition of Republican libertarianism. And its meaning is this: Whatever libertarian Republicans want it to mean.
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