Our View - Thursday

Bullying bureaucrats

High court should rein in rogue agencies

Let’s say government officials want you to turn over a portion of your property to them for free. Let’s say you refuse, arguing that you have no legal requirement to do so. And let’s say the government then embarks on a harassment campaign to intimidate you into giving it what it wants.

Should that be legal? We know that the Fifth Amendment protects the public’s right to keep government off their property. But is it implicit in that right that government agents cannot abuse their power to harass you?

This is the subject of a case now being mulled by the U.S. Supreme Court, Wilkie v. Robbins. As R.S. Radford and Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation explain in a Legal Times article, Harvey Frank Robbins is a Wyoming man who bought a ranch in 1993, “not knowing that the previous owner had agreed to give the Bureau of Land Management an easement over the land. BLM agents, however, had neglected to record the easement, so when the purchase went through, Robbins got the land free and clear.”

This clearly was the mistake of the government agents, yet they weren’t about to let Robbins off the hook when he did not accede to their request to reinstate the easement. The agents made threats against him. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke during oral arguments “of a pattern of harassing conduct that included trespasses on this man’s lodge and leaving the place in disarray, videotaping the guests, selective enforcement of the grazing laws, a whole pattern of things, even asking the Bureau of Indian Affairs to impound his cattle.”

Rather than punish government agents who have clearly abused their power, the federal government is asserting in the nation’s highest court the right of government representatives to act in this very manner.

In this case, the federal government claims that there is no constitutional right to physically exclude the government from your property, and even if there were such a right that it would offer no protection against harassment. This government argument, Radford and Sandefur explain in an amicus brief on behalf of Robbins, is “based on a disturbing and mistaken understanding of the relationship between the American people, their government and constitutional protections of private property rights. The framers of the Constitution accorded great weight to the importance of private property as a bulwark of personal sovereignty and autonomy, which not even the power of government could breach except in limited circumstances. . . . If the government were allowed to retaliate against citizens who exercise their right to exclude government agents from their land, the right itself would be extinguished.”

In a society that respected individual freedom, the agents who harassed Robbins would face prosecution. Instead, they are exonerated and the government itself arrogantly demands a right to harass individual citizens because — get this — the Constitution does not specifically forbid harassment by such officials. If the Supreme Court sides with the Bureau of Land Management, then the rule of law will be eroded and we will all be subject to the whims of the petty despots who sometimes work in federal agencies. A decision is not expected until early summer. We hope it will come down on the side of property owners — and against immunity for bullying bureaucrats.

Chinese being caught in Net of freedom

In an authoritarian nation, individual freedom is subordinate to the state’s authority. Dissenters risk their lives and personal fortunes by speaking out. In the People’s Republic of China, those risks are still very real. As the U.S. State Department noted for 2006, China’s “human-rights record remained poor, and, in certain areas, deteriorated. There were an increased number of highprofile cases involving the monitoring, harassment, detention, arrest and imprisonment of journalists, writers, activists and defense lawyers, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under law.”

But reportedly, freedom-seeking risk-takers increasingly are aided and perhaps emboldened by Internet communications. Take, for example, Zhang Zilin, of the Web-based China Pan-Blue Alliance, which is seeking re-unification with Taiwan. Zhang recently spread details of a bloody clash between 20,000 farmers and police armed with batons in central China. Farmers had protested a bus-fare increase. In another day and time, crushing such a protest might have gone largely unnoticed by the rest of China or the world. But Zhang, the Associated Press reported, “is a part of a burgeoning breed of activists . . . eager for social justice and

linked by the Internet.”

After World War II, China’s autocratic socialist system imposed repressive controls over everyday life at the cost of tens of millions of lives. After 1978, China’s leaders turned to market-oriented economics. By 2000, output quadrupled, according to the CIA World Fact Book. For many, living standards improved dramatically, yet political controls remain tight.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has noted, “[P]olice can arrest people and torture or kill them with impunity, even if they are trying to do nothing more than worship God.” Fellow New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal described China as “the world’s biggest dictatorship, one particularly devoted to religious persecution.” The Voice of the Martyrs, a ministry to persecuted Christians worldwide, says China’s government “is ramping up persecution against Christians as the 2008 Olympic Games approach.”

China is proof that there is more to freedom than free markets. Yet among the fruits of China’s market reform has been a huge expansion in Internet use, with more than 100 million users at the end of 2005. Will Internet communications transform this authoritarian nation? That’s our hope.