The Plan Is Empirically Popular Congress People Disapprove of Racial Profiling

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Congress – popular

The plan is empirically popular—Congress people disapprove of racial profiling

Chaffey ‘12 [Devon Chaffey,6/07/12, American Civil Liberties Union, “Members of Congress Urge Investigation of FBI Muslim Surveillance”] Accessed Online: 7/12/15

Yesterday 22 Members of Congress sent a letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice urging him to launch an investigation into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's improper recording and dissemination of information about the First Amendment-protected activities of American Muslims. Several of the members who joined the letter-including Representatives Pete Stark (D-CA-13), Anna Eshoo (D-CA-14), Sam Farr (D- CA-17), Mike Honda (D- CA-15), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-16), and Barbara Lee (D-CA-09) -represent districts in Northern California in which FBI memoranda document the use of community outreach for intelligence purposes. The joint letter rightly highlights the negative impacts of the FBI’s misuse of community and mosque outreach to gather intelligence about Americans. The letter states: Any FBI practice of taking information collected during community outreach efforts for the purpose of utilizing it as intelligence threatens to erode crucial trust between federal law enforcement and American communities. It is also contrary to basic constitutional principles of free speech and freedom of religion.

Congressional Fights

Discussion of racial profiling empirically sparks controversy and fights with both congress and the American public

Billups ‘12 [Andrea Billups,3/28/12, Washington Times, “Trayvon’s wardrobe a hot-button topic in racial profiling debate”] Accessed Online: 7/10/15

The hooded sweatshirt — or hoodie — has emerged as an unlikely symbol of political division and racial tension as the controversy over the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Florida by a neighborhood watch captain last month continues to simmer. Critics piled on the National Rifle Association on Wednesday after it was revealed that the national gun lobby’s online store was offering a $59.95 “concealed carry hoodie,” billed as “ideal for carrying your favorite compact to mid-size pistol.” And on Capitol Hill, a black Democratic congressman was ousted from the floor for violating the chamber’s dress code after attempting to deliver a statement while wearing a gray hoodie with the hood pulled over his head. The confrontation that left black high school student Trayvon Martin dead after a clash with neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who has a white father and Hispanic mother, in a Sanford, Fla., gated community continues to reverberate in both the political and cultural worlds. Trayvon was unarmed and walking to his father’s fiancee’s house at the time of the incident. Florida authorities have brought no charges in the investigation, and the state’s broad “stand your ground” self-defense law has itself become part of the debate in the wake of the shooting. In Washington, Rep. Bobby L. Rush, Illinois Democrat, and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, contended the hoodie he was wearing symbolized the “racial profiling” that led to Trayvon’s death. “I applaud the young people all across the land who are making a statement about hoodies, about the real hoodlums in this nation, specifically those who tread on our law wearing official or quasi-official cloaks,” said Mr. Rush, as Rep. Gregg Harper of Mississippi, who was presiding over the floor as speaker, gaveled him out of order. “Racial profiling has got to stop,” Mr. Rush said. “Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.” After Mr. Rush finished and was escorted out, Mr. Harper said House rules ban the wearing of hats while the chamber is in session, noting that includes hoods. Elsewhere, a New Orleans police officer resigned Wednesday after he posted a sharp comment on a local TV station website that had reported on a rally supporting Trayvon. “Act like a thug, die like one!” Jason Giroir wrote. Trayvon’s supporters also have been forced to backtrack at times in the debate. An address retweeted by film director Spike Lee, purportedly of shooter George Zimmerman’s Sanford house, sent the real owners of the home, an elderly couple, fleeing in fear that agitated followers might attempt to extract their own local justice. Protests over the police’s handling of the case have been countered by new leaked information painting a more complex portrait of the victim, the shooter and the events of Feb. 26.

Public Unpopular

Much of the American public supports racial profiling, seeing it as a necessary tool to protect security

Hernandez ‘01 [Raymond Hernandez,9/20/01, New York Times, “New Racial Profiling Debate Puts Legislators to the Test”] Accessed Online: 7/10/15

But their commitment to that cause is being put to the test in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. In a series of recent interviews, many of these lawmakers expressed misgivings that concerns over civil liberties might take a back seat to the nation's sudden clamor for beefed-up policing. Indeed, many Americans who once expressed outrage at the idea of singling out minority groups for searches and interrogation are no longer sure that that's such a bad idea. People don't have to look beyond the borders of New Jersey to see the shifting political climate. John Farmer Jr., the state's attorney general, recently announced that the police might have to stop and question people who look Middle Eastern, presumably because all the hijackers in the recent terrorist attacks are believed to be Arabs. That seemed like a reasonable response to some people, given the enormity of what happened on Sept. 11. But Representative Robert Menendez, a Democrat of Jersey City, said that such talk was simply unacceptable. He recalled how the country abandoned civil liberties during World War II by randomly placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps. ''The day we begin to abrogate the Constitution simply for security is a day we will rue,'' said Mr. Menendez, one of 10 New Jersey legislators in Congress (there are a total of 15) who placed their names on a bill that sought to outlaw racial profiling. It's hard to argue with Mr. Menendez -- in principle, anyway. But Robert Torricelli, New Jersey's senior senator, sounded a warning the other day when asked about the prospects that Congress would move to outlaw racial profiling in this new climate of fear. ''This is the worst possible environment to be making judgments about our civil liberties,'' he said, noting with disapproval the willingness people have to give up some rights in exchange for security. Like others who reject racial profiling, Mr. Torricelli said the lesson to draw from the recent terrorist attacks was that the law-enforcement community needed to engage in smarter policing, not wholesale targeting of ethnic groups. He pointedly recalled how many Americans immediately assumed that Arabs were behind the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City in 1995, only to discover that the people behind it were white Americans. ''If racial profiling had been permitted after the Oklahoma City bombings, police would have been looking for suspects who looked Middle Eastern,'' Mr. Torricelli said. ''That would have been fruitless.'' Not everyone is all that concerned the nation will abandon its principles in the aftermath of the attacks. Representative Rush D. Holt, a Democrat from Princeton Junction, said that he had been struck at the outrage people had shown at the anti-Arab sentiment that had flared up since the attacks. He said the revulsion over such bigotry might make Americans much more vigilant about protecting basic civil liberties. ''I'm struck by the concern members of Congress have shown over the racial, ethnic and religious backlash'' provoked by the attacks, he said. ''I think now there is a backlash against the backlash.'' Echoing Mr. Torricelli's comments about the need for more intelligent policing, he reaffirmed his support for legislation seeking to outlaw racial profiling. ''Racial profiling is intellectually lazy,'' he said. ''It's never good policing.'' ''What we're trying to do,'' he added, ''is prevent terrorists from depriving us of the free society that we've enjoyed for two centuries.'' But Representative Marge Roukema, the dean of the New Jersey delegation, sharply questioned the wisdom of considering a bill to outlaw racial profiling at this time. Ms. Roukema went out of her way to emphasize that she opposed the practice, noting that her ancestors were Italian immigrants who endured ethnic scorn when they arrived in America earlier in the century. ''It's not as though I'm callous to the issue,'' she said. ''I'm very sensitive to the issue.'' But Ms. Roukema said that she was concerned about doing anything that made it difficult for law-enforcement officials to do their job, particularly in light of the threat that terrorism posed. ''You're going to be putting unnecessary obstacles in the way of their enforcement of the law,'' she said when asked about the anti-racial profiling legislation that her New Jersey colleague supported. ''It's certainly not appropriate to be taking it under consideration.''

Advantage Answers

A2: Impacts

Western Liberalism Good

As students and scholars we are obligated to stay engaged in the shaping of western and international institutions. Failure to do risks a collapse of the global democratic revolution that will cause widespread genocide and nuclear conflict.

Shaw in 2k1 (Martin, sociologist of global politics, war and genocide. He is Research Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals and the new politics of international relations,

The new politics of international relations require us, therefore, to go beyond the anti-imperialism of the intellectual left as well as of the semi-anarchist traditions of the academic discipline. We need to recognise three fundamental truths: First, in the twenty-first century people struggling for democratic liberties across the non-Western world are likely to make constant demands on our solidarity. Courageous academics, students and other intellectuals will be in the forefront of these movements. They deserve the unstinting support of intellectuals in the West. Second, the old international thinking in which democratic movements are seen as purely internal to states no longer carries conviction – despite the lingering nostalgia for it on both the American right and the anti-American left. The idea that global principles can and should be enforced worldwide is firmly established in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. This consciousness will a powerful force in the coming decades. Third, global state-formation is a fact. International institutions are being extended, and they have a symbiotic relation with the major centre of state power, the increasingly internationalised Western conglomerate. The success of the global-democratic revolutionary wave depends first on how well it is consolidated in each national context – but second, on how thoroughly it is embedded in international networks of power, at the centre of which, inescapably, is the West. From these political fundamentals, strategic propositions can be derived. First, democratic movements cannot regard non-governmental organisations and civil society as ends in themselves. They must aim to civilise local states, rendering them open, accountable and pluralistic, and curtail the arbitrary and violent exercise of power. Second, democratising local states is not a separate task from integrating them into global and often Western-centred networks. Reproducing isolated local centres of power carries with it classic dangers of states as centres of war. Embedding global norms and integrating new state centres with global institutional frameworks are essential to the control of violence. (To put this another way, the proliferation of purely national democracies is not a recipe for peace.) Third, while the global revolution cannot do without the West and the UN, neither can it rely on them unconditionally. We need these power networks, but we need to tame them, too, to make their messy bureaucracies enormously more accountable and sensitive to the needs of society worldwide. This will involve the kind of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ argued for by David Held80 and campaigned for by the new Charter 9981. It will also require us to advance a global social-democratic agenda, to address the literally catastrophic scale of world social inequalities. Fourth, if we need the global-Western state, if we want to democratise it and make its institutions friendlier to global peace and justice, we cannot be indifferent to its strategic debates. It matters to develop robust peacekeeping as a strategic alternative to bombing our way through zones of crisis. It matters that international intervention supports pluralist structures, rather than ratifying Bosnia-style apartheid. Likewise, the internal politics of Western elites matter. It makes a difference to halt the regression to isolationist nationalism in American politics. It matters that the European Union should develop into a democratic polity with a globally responsible direction. It matters that the British state, still a pivot of the Western system of power, stays in the hands of outward-looking new social democrats rather than inward-looking old conservatives. As political intellectuals in the West, we need to have our eyes on the ball at our feet, but we also need to raise them to the horizon. We need to grasp the historic drama that is transforming worldwide relationships between people and state, as well as between state and state. We need to think about how the turbulence of the global revolution can be consolidated in democratic, pluralist, international networks of both social relations and state authority. We cannot be simply optimistic about this prospect. Sadly, it will require repeated violent political crises to push Western governments towards the required restructuring of world institutions.82 What I have outlined tonight is a huge challenge; but the alternative is to see the global revolution splutter into defeat, degenerate into new genocidal wars, perhaps even nuclear conflicts. The practical challenge for all concerned citizens, and the theoretical and analytical challenges for students of international relations and politics, are intertwined.

Not all forms of liberal ideology are the same – prefer specificty

Richard Youngs 2011, Director of FRIDE and Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, “Misunderstanding the maladies of liberal democracy promotion,” FRIDE working paper, january, google

Two commonly-made assumptions rest on empirical ground that is not firm. The first of these is that Western powers are in essence over-promoting liberal democracy. The facts suggest instead that they are not doing much to promote democracy of any type, whether liberal or otherwise. This is the most notable policy trend of recent years, under-stressed if not entirely ignored by arguments that derive from critical theory. Second is the supposition that where they are active in democracy support, Western powers follow a rigidly liberal template that is inappropriate and inattentive to local demands and specificities. Of course, in places some such concerns are well founded and injustices are undoubtedly committed in the pursuit of political change. But this argument is far too sweeping when forwarded as a general meta-critique of democracy promotion. Real life policy formulation is much more ad hoc and varied in its conceptual bases. This is evident if one takes the trouble to look at the nitty-gritty substance of what democracy promoters are doing on the ground. In some cases Western powers assertively promote liberal democracy. But other combinations are also adopted. Sometimes policy favours illiberal democracy; sometimes it seeks advances in liberal rights without democracy; and sometimes it is active in supporting neither the ‘liberal’ nor the ‘democracy’ strand of liberal democracy. The precise nature and balance of such policy options varies across different democracy promoters, different ‘target’ states and over different moments in time. Critical theory inspired approaches risk seeing a uniformity that simply does not exist in concrete democracy support strategies. They are if anything more straight-jacketed than the policy-makers they mock as rigidly simplistic in their conceptual understanding of democracy. This is not to suggest that all is well in the democracy promoters’ house; but the renovations needed are more subtle in nature.

Terror Talk Good

Defining terror is critical to defeating terrorism and limits extremities of violence

Johns 04(John H., Ret. Brig. Gen., 10/17/4, JPG

If a belligerent wishes to brand acts of terrorism against it as immoral, it must find a definition that distinguishes the type of terrorism used by it and its allies from that of its adversaries. In the case of the current "war against terrorism," declared by President Bush, this presents problems. It is useful to rally the American people by stating the effort in moralistic terms of good versus eviland rejecting any suggestion that terrorism is any way morally justified. Another way to isolate the Islamic terrorists is to define terrorism to exclude actions of nations or their military. Recent definitions by U.S. Government Agencies in fact offer such definitions, restricting the label to non-nation activity. This has the convenience of putting our use of military force outside the bounds of terrorism. This restricted definition, of course, denies legitimacy to the only means of violence available to the weak and takes away the reciprocal advantage. Terrorism is the force of choice for domestic dissidents and the militarily weak in international affairs because it gives them an asymmetrical advantage, especially if they cannot be readily identified. Non-nation groups conduct much of international terrorism such as the 9-11 acts. While they may have the support of governments, these connections are difficult to prove. This limits the counter-terrorist efforts because over reaction against broad targets can generate more hostilityand lose moral legitimacyfor the counter terrorism effort. More will be said on this regarding the Iraq war. Word-smithing to exclude one side's use of terrorism may appeal to the militarily powerful and their followers, but non-nation terrorist groups may argue that the ends justify the means if their terrorist acts result in a change in policies that they label as unjust. Moreover, the current enemies of the United States may argue that U.S. policies themselves involve a form of economic and military terrorism - economic sanctions against Iraq from 1991 to the recent invasion, sanctions against Cuba, etc. and militarily against the Palestinians (through Israel as a proxy), Nicaragua, etc. It all depends on whose ox is being gored; one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Surveys consistently show that much of the Islamic world views terrorists against Israel as "freedom fighters." President Reagan labeled the Islamic terrorists fighting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 80s (including the Taliban, a member of which was Osama bin Laden) as "freedom fighters." They are now "terrorists." Again, it depends on whose ox is being gored. In all conflicts, each side is convinced of its moral high ground. It then becomes a contest for convincing target audiences that you have the moral high ground. In the current war, the audiences include the American public, the populations in which the enemy operates, and the world community. Thus, the task in the current "war on terrorism" is to convince these target audiences that ours is the moral and just cause. In order to keep support among the populations in which they operate and draw their recruits, the terrorists will have to win the moral argument. The evidence so far is that the terrorists are winningexcept in the United States and Israel. It should be clear to the reader that the central theme of this essay is that victory in the "war on terrorism" will be achieved only if we win the hearts and minds of several target audiences. To date, we appear to be losing that battle among some audiences. A crucial question is: are we losing the battle because of our failure to communicate effectively, or must we reexamine some of our policies? This question is best answered by looking at specific target audiences. In doing this, we must keep in mind that borders between these audiences are porous. Unlike wars of the past, where nations could more or less eparate these audiences, what is said to one audience is likely to be available to the others. The message that appeals to one may alienate another. Truly, this is the age of global communications.