Hmm. Seems like the RAVE Act wasn’t the only bit of behind-the-scenes amending to the Amber Alert Bill which Congress did, indeed, pass.
Among the other bits slipped in, subject to know public hearings or debates:
- Some serious tinkering with federal sentencing guidelines, ostensibly related to child sex offenses, but (depending on who you talk to) possibly further limiting judicial discretion in a number of cases. Even Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that the provisions “would do serious harm to the basic structure of the sentencing guideline system and would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences.”
- It’s now a crime to use misleading Internet domain names to trick people into seeing obscene material (which is already prohibited) or tricking minors into seeing material “harmful” to them. The text and an analysis of this part can be found here.
- The bill also bans the distribution of “virtual” child pornography — legal pornographic images of adults that have been digitally altered to look like children having sex. The Supreme Court already struck down a similar law in the past.
Regardless of how you feel about the individual provisions, it’s dirty pool to slip them into a “national feel-good” law like the Amber Alert system bill while it’s in conference committee. If the idea has merit, it should be debated openly and passed the same way; if it’s politically difficult to get that done, maybe that’s a sign the idea shouldn’t be made into law.
That is sort of how a representative democracy is supposed to work.
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There were debates. Look at the legislative history of H.R. 1104. The sentencing guidelines and the virtual porn had recorded votes (357 – 58 and 406 – 15 respectively). The bill itself passed by 410-14 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. So, there was debate in the Committee of the Whole on 3/27 and there was House Judiciary Committee meetings on 3/11. The conference report toned down some of the sentencing guidelines. The conspiracy theory doesn’t hold up.
Rich, where do you dig up information like that?
thomas.loc.gov
I was looking on thomas at the text of the current war supplemental authorization and found this:
(5) by inserting after “a study regarding delivery of pediatric health care in northeastern Oklahoma,” “$225,000 is available for the Mental Health Association of Tarrant County, Ft. Worth, Texas to provide school-based mental health education to schools in Tarrant County, $200,000 is available for the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco for a Developing Country Medical Program to facilitate clinician exchange between the United States and developing countries, $1,000,000 is available for the Geisinger Health System, Harrisburg, PA to establish centers of excellence for the treatment of autism”.
Uh, that will win the war.
It looks like Senator Allard go the following in the appropriation, also:
Panel To Review Sexual Misconduct Allegations at United States Air Force Academy
The conferees agree to amend language in this title, as proposed by the Senate, which establishes a panel to review sexual misconduct allegations at the U.S. Air Force Academy.