Are We as Secure as We Were?

The Reagan Administration has failed to substantially displace or curtail the progressive initiatives of the New Deal and Great Society through congressional action. Now a part of the fabric of American life, they have survived highly visible and vocal challenges raised in political campaigns and in debate on Capitol Hill.

On another plane, however, the Administration is achieving considerably more success: in pushing back individual and civil rights gains that have helped fulfill the revolutionary American dream of equal opportunity and an open society. It is a quiet and invidious campaign fought in the shadows of the nation’s regulatory bureaucracy and the complexities of the legal system.

Here, there is the nibbling away of voting rights; there, the denial of entry to the country of foreign visitors because of their political views. The Administration chips away at long-accepted affirmative action and desegregation programs. Scientists are prevented or discouraged from presenting technical papers. Commerce laws are used to bar the importation of foreign publications. A civilian intelligence officer is tried for espionage for disclosing information that was available to the public. The people are cut off from sources of government facts and figures. There is a constant effort to erode the Freedom of Information Act.

The President refuses, on national television, to say whether the Central Intelligence Agency is helping to overthrow a foreign government with which we enjoy diplomatic relations. He justifies this by saying the U.S. government has a right to withhold information, even “when you people (the media) have a right to know,” because the opposition might then find out what the United States is up to. This statement comes from the same President who often insists that the government has no rights; only the people have rights.

Meanwhile, the Administration has consolidated federal rule-making in the Office of Management and Budget so that proposed agency regulations are screened before they can receive any public attention or comment. Thus, directives of Congress can be frustrated in secret in the name of cost-effectiveness.

And now, the Administration talks openly about restructuring the American judiciary to meet its own political tests to aid in the campaign of achieving through quiet administrative rule and court order that which Congress refuses to approve. “We look for judicial philosophy, not ideology,” says a Justice Department official who screens candidates for lifetime judicial appointments. But how will the people know?

The President claims that the Founding Fathers never intended the judiciary to take the activist course it has over the past two centuries. Trying to interpret the intention of the Founding Fathers can lead to never-ending debate, but Thomas Jefferson, for one, said that laws and institutions, including the Constitution, “must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind . . . and keep pace with the times.”

Many of these actions have been protested and challenged, but often to little avail. Viewed individually, the Administration’s efforts have not been perceived as part of a systematic undermining of governmental institutions that were created to protect the individual.

Taken collectively, they need to be recognized as a threat to American rights and liberties. The Administration that first ran against big government in the name of the people has made government less accessible and less accountable to the people. It has become less protective of those who need help in achieving equality of opportunity.

There should now be a time for accounting. The authority of the republic throughout the world is no greater than the strength of the rights of the most humble American citizen. It is fair to ask, then, Is each American as secure in all his rights as he was five years ago?