Juvenile crime bill’s hidden agenda?

The new Juvenile Crime Bill, which has cleared the Senate and is now
being debated in the House of Representatives, is coming too fast, is
much too large, contains no legitimate congressional involvement and
covers much more than juvenile crime.

That’s according to legislative research analysts at the
Independence Institute, a conservative think
tank that has just published an in-depth report evaluating the new bill.

Dave Kopel, who co-authored the report, told WorldNetDaily that an
examination of the massive bill highlights “some of most obvious
problems with both the Senate bill (S. 254), and with any House of
Representatives counterpart which copies provisions from S. 254.”

Kopel said the public’s perception of the bill is that it is merely
designed to federalize many more juvenile crimes and address the issue
of gun control.

“But there is a whole lot more to this bill than what is being
mentioned in the press,” he added.

For example, “there’s a massive forfeiture expansion, which lets
federal prosecutors do forfeitures for any state felony,” he said.
“That will also include state-level misdemeanors.”

The bill also includes mandatory sentences for gun and drug crimes,
as well as massive new wiretap expansions, “including intercepts on
pager transmissions, which could occur with a warrant,” he said.

“That will create the first warrantless electronic surveillance in
U.S. history,” Kopel said. He acknowledged that federal law enforcement
agencies have been pushing for the lifting of such constitutional
restrictions on privacy “for quite some time, and incrementally, they
seem to be getting it.”

In essence, “the bill has nothing to do with preventing incidents
like that which occurred in Littleton, Colorado,” Kopel said, making a
general reference to the rash of school shootings across the country in
recent months.

This bill is “just another attempt to use tragedy to expand the power
of the federal government,” said Kopel. “In that vein, they’re trying
to use this huge 600-page bill to get things passed that could never
pass if they were introduced one at a time in Congress.”

“Despite what most in Congress think, the solution to juvenile crime
is not some sound bite encapsulated on the floor of either House and
made into a uniform federal law,” he said. “The main advantage of
having 50 different states is the diversity allowed for different states
to try different approaches to serious problems like juvenile crime.”
Kopel said the current massive bill will “wipe out that great advantage,
will federalize juvenile crime, then turns federal prosecutors into
juvenile prosecutors.” The net result, he believes, is that the problem
of juvenile crime won’t diminish much, if at all.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM),
an activist organization opposed to mandatory minimum sentencing for
jail terms, said the Juvenile Crime Bill also contained language
imposing mandatory sentencing for more crimes.

“The Juvenile Justice bill in the House of Representatives is full of
new and increased mandatory minimums for gun and drug violations,” said
a FAMM action alert. The organization also said that Rep. Maxine
Waters, a California Democrat, introduced an amendment in mid-June to
remove the mandatory sentencing provisions of the bill.

The Waters bill, called the “Major Drug Trafficking Prosecution Act
of 1999 (H.R. 1681),” is intended to “curb prosecutions of low-level
drug offenders in federal court.” FAMM said, “In order to concentrate
Federal resources aimed at the prosecution of drug offenses on those
offenses that are major, the bill requires that prosecutors obtain
written approval of the attorney general before prosecuting certain drug
offenses in federal court.”

“This is the first bill to repeal mandatory sentences since 1994,”
said Julie Stewart, president of FAMM. “Finally, the failure of
mandatory sentences and the damage they have wreaked on thousands of
families is being addressed by Congress.”

Kopel added, “It might be appropriate to have mandatory sentencing
for some juvenile crimes, but that’s a matter for a state to decide, not
the federal government.”

There is nothing in the Constitution, he said, that “gives the
federal government the right to impose sentences on juveniles, or
regulate gun show sales, or anything relating to most provisions in this
bill. It’s absurd to think otherwise because these are matters for
states to decide, as they have always been.”

Kopel said he believes the Senate version of the bill will eventually
be “watered down” in the House, but added that many of the provisions
Congress ultimately will pass “are just as inappropriate for the federal
government to be deciding.”

“It will be a lot like the lesser of two evils,” he said.