The Transportation Security Administration has a long history of stretching power far past the bounds of sense of decency. This 2008 piece from the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Daily exposes the perils of a bad atttiude at the airport..
Freedom Daily, June 2008
Federal Attitude Police
by James Bovard
The Transportation Security Administration has created more gantlets at American airports than most travelers realize. It has continually changed the rules for flying since it first deployed its 40,000+ army of screeners across the land. Americans are at much greater risk of being arrested or fined in the airport for not kowtowing to federal agents. The rise of the TSA vivifies how low contemporary Americans have fallen. James Madison observed in The Federalist Papers,
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be … so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.
Today,
Punishment for “disruptive behavior” sounds a lot like grade school except for the $10,000 fine instead of a detention.
Heck, for $10,000, you could have bought the entire elementary school I went to….
The TSA system of ‘justice’ sounds a lot like the stereotypical southern sheriff who arrests and fines people passing through for various flimsy reasons, and piles on more fines if they rightly get their hackles up and protest the actions of the kangaroo court in which they have landed.
Both also seek to induce a lot of squealing.