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As we gather today, there is an insidious conspiracy underway just across the Potomac River in our nation's capital. This is not a conspiracy that meets in dark rooms in the dead of night. The co-conspirators don't identify themselves with a secret handshake and a code word. The conspiracy I'll be discussing today meets in a much different environment. Some of their offices bear names we all know -- the Departments of Justice, Transportation, or Health and Human Services. Others are more obscure, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Institutes of Health, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The members of this conspiracy have different motivations, most appear quite benign on the surface. Some want to acquire new law enforcement powers to fight criminals. Others would like to construct new databases to "ease" our entry into the new information age. Some are motivated by a desire to do good, others simply want to get a larger allocation of the federal budget. Many of the members of this conspiracy don't know each other, work together, or even subscribe to the same political philosophy. In fact, "co-conspirator" is probably the wrong word to use when describing a network of people who are so loosely affiliated. A more accurate way to put it is, they are simply people united by a common goal; In a nutshell, they support enlarging the power and size of the federal government with little or no regard for the most precious right each of us has; If allowed to continue, their efforts will irresistibly and inevitably culminate in a society in which the freedom and judgement of individuals, is completely replaced by the restriction and uniformity of federal regulation. Lest you think I haven't done my homework or that I'm jumping to conclusions too quickly, I'll tell you about several specific rights that are disappearing even as we sit here today. Throughout, I hope you'll remember my views have been shaped not only by my work in the Congress, but also by the years I spent as a United States Attorney in the Department of Justice and as an employee with the Central Intelligence Agency. These years have left me with some knowledge of the vast power of the federal government. Power that can -- and should -- be used to protect life and liberty; Some of you may be familiar with a situation that came to light as the 105th Congress was sputtering to a close last year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attempted to institute procedures requiring that every state adopt an explicit laundry list of federally mandated characteristics for driver's licenses -- a National ID card, if you will. However, the further danger of these proposed regulations lay in its mandate that every American have their federal Social Security number permanently identified with their state drivers license. If this regulation had been implemented, anyone who wished to be allowed to drive on the roads paid for with their tax dollars, would first have to produce a Social Security number and have it printed on their drivers licenses. Putting aside for purposes of argument what a government with totalitarian leanings could do with this information, imagine what might occur if your Social Security number and drivers license didn't match up due to nothing more than a bureaucratic snafu. You might not be able to board a plane, see a doctor, or register a child in school; You would instantly be the subject of heavy scrutiny by suspicious law enforcement officers, bureaucrats, regulators and commercial credit institutions. Fortunately, in the last weeks of the 105th Congress we were able to delay the implementation of this regulation for a year in order to buy more time to block it permanently. This happened because civil libertarians -- liberal and conservative activists -- from the ACLU to Eagle Forum and from CATO to the Christian Coalition, stood firm, and kept fighting, until we succeeded in blocking this ill-advised move, at least temporarily. However, we discovered an interesting thing when we traced it back to its source. Turns out the authority for this draconian regulation was quietly slipped into a spending bill under a Republican-led Congress, with no debate and no separate vote, but with the ostensible goal of reducing illegal immigration. This same over-reaction to often legitimate law-enforcement needs, is also regrettably evident in the wake of catastrophes, such as airline crashes or terrorist bombings. For example, following the tragic bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, the Clinton Department of Justice immediately leapt forward to grab all sorts of new law enforcement powers, none of which would have done a single thing to prevent the bombing if they had been in place. Again, a coalition of civil liberties groups, from the National Rifle Association to the Libertarian Party, was able to substantially reduce the intrusiveness of legislation passed following the bombing. But we had to fight virtually the entire leadership of the Congress, and initially a majority of both Democrat and Republican members, in order to stop the most egregious provisions of the bill from becoming law. We see the same tendency in the wake of airline disasters. Never mind that your odds of dying in an airline crash are about 1 in 7 million, as opposed to a 1 in 600,000 chance of choking to death, or a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying in an auto accident. Whenever an aircraft crashes, we are greeted with new restrictions on travel at airports and calls for new federal power to crack down on suspected terrorists. Following the tragic crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, before the black boxes had even been found, and while most people in positions of leadership automatically assumed a terrorist bomb caused the crash, GOP and Democrat leaders took to the airwaves to push for further "anti-terrorist" law enforcement funding and powers. Remember, this was only a few months after the omnibus 1996 anti-terrorism bill was signed, and while most of the billions of dollars it authorized were not even appropriated yet.
However, it is poised to enter a new, dangerous, and possibly irreversible phase. And, as we all have seen, the Clinton Administration remains committed to an all-out campaign to deprive law-abiding citizens of their constitutionally-guaranteed right to keep and bear arms. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is continuing its efforts to establish records of law-abiding gun owners despite the fact that federal laws -- including the Brady Act! Just this week, President Clinton proposed further restrictions on the Second Amendment in his State of the Union address. Even though a National Instant Check System has been implemented, the President wants to re-enact a waiting period for gun purchases; And, even though trigger locks are ineffective, and in fact dangerous in that they may hamper use of firearms for personal defense, the President wants to require you to use them. I ask you, if an explicitly recognized constitutional right -- to keep and bear arms -- can be taken away from us, where does it end? Many liberals who are incensed by the slightest hint of an attack on the First Amendment, would do well to remember it will be next in line if the Second Amendment is allowed to fall. Bill Clinton's and Sarah Brady's attack on our right to keep and bear arms must end, and must end now. Now, before it enters a new and far-reaching phase, if the anti-gun lawsuits mounted by trial lawyers encouraged by the tobacco settlement, dangling dreams of billion-dollar windfalls before mayors of cities with financial woes, are allowed to succeed. Another battlefield on which we must fight to protect our most basic rights is on the ever-expanding electronic frontier that will be the new field for competition in the 21st Century. We must stop government bureaucrats and federal law enforcement agencies from requiring that manufacturers of encryption chips, designed to give companies and individuals an ability to protect their data, give the federal government the "keys" to every such encry...
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