Everyone is complaining about the long lines and missed flights that are being caused by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), but no one is mentioning the root issue. The TSA is an unconstitutional agency. The TSA creates a bigger risk to our lives and prevents nothing.

When you go through the TSA check point, what you leave behind are your 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, 4th Amendment, 5th Amendment, and 10th Amendment rights, just to name a few. The Federal Government has no enumerated authority to create an agency like the TSA in the first place. The powers listed that Congress can legislate on, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, do not include policing the people, providing security for travel, or violating our rights for any reason. Let’s examine each right they violate and how they do it.

When it comes to the 1st Amendment, it is the most minor of the violations of your rights, but a violation nonetheless. It will become obvious to you that you’ve lost the right to free speech if you crack a joke about a bomb in the TSA line. Congress can make no law abridging the freedom of speech. The TSA can’t make any laws. The TSA is an agency that Congress created though unconstitutional legislation. Congress is not allowed to create agencies that wield Congressional powers let alone agencies that wield powers Congress doesn’t have. Almost every federal agency is unconstitutional in this way. They effectively legislate by regulation and then act as the judiciary by policing and judging you on the spot.

Your 2nd Amendment right to bear arms is obviously violated when you pass through a TSA checkpoint. The 2nd Amendment doesn’t say, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed unless you travel.” No level of government has authority to infringe upon your right to keep and bear arms for any reason. Had at least four passengers been exercising their 2nd Amendment rights on 9/11/2001, the Twin Towers may still be standing and 3000 people may still be alive.

Liberals and ill informed people claim that being on a plane is a good reason to revoke your 2nd amendment rights for two reasons. Firstly, what if someone goes crazy and starts shooting everyone? Well, what if someone goes crazy and starts shooting everyone in a theater? What if someone goes crazy and starts shooting everyone in a Walmart? Answer: Shoot back. Being in a plane doesn’t change anything. Secondly, they claim that if you shoot a hole in the fuselage of an airplane, it will depressurize and everyone will die. This is scientifically impossible as shown on Myth Busters. The pumps which pressurize the plane more than compensate for pressure lost through tiny bullet holes. Sure, air goes out the holes, but at a relatively small rate compared with the size of the cabin. Conduct your own experiment. Shake a 2 liter soda bottle. Poke it with a pin. Does it explode? No. It sprays out a thin jet of soda and depressurizes at a very slow rate. The answer to terrorism isn’t to disarm ourselves, it is to arm ourselves better.

Government shouldn’t be disarming us for any reason, especially to travel domestically. If you are traveling internationally, it’s a different story and should depend on foreign agents or private companies to screen you. When you enter the gate to board a plane to a different country, you’re crossing jurisdictional boundaries. The same is true when entering the gate in a foreign airport to travel back to the United States. Domestic travelers should never face a government agent for any reason, let alone to violate your 2nd Amendment rights.

When the TSA agents force you to show your ID and travel documents, you have just lost your 4th Amendment rights. The government has no warrant with your name on it, and no probable cause. Ask the TSA agent for a warrant and see what happens. You are treated as if you are a Jew in NAZI Germany and must show your papers. Keeping this from happening is precisely why the 4th Amendment was ratified. No one in government has any reason to know who you are, where you are going, or why you are going there. They have no right to X-Ray you, search you, frisk you, or seize your property. The 4th Amendment says that your right to be secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall NOT be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. It doesn’t say, “Federal government has a right to set up agencies with blanket search and seizure power if you travel.” We the People of the United States have been so dumbed down that we allow this without questioning the Constitutionality of it. We complain when the lines are too long, but don’t seem to care what the line is for. We didn’t need the TSA for over 200 years and we don’t need them now.

If you have been through a TSA check point, then you are probably familiar with being questioned about things that are not the government’s business. This is a violation of your 5th Amendment rights. You are being made a witness against yourself and you aren’t even charged with a crime. They want to know where you are going, why you are going, and even if you packed your own bags. They have a lot more questions when you are traveling back to the United States from a foreign country when you are at the boarding gate. You are considered to be back in U.S. jurisdiction to some degree. At that point in a foreign airport where you are back under American jurisdiction, once they see your passport and verify that you are American, that should end all future discussion and you should be on your way. You have the right not to incriminate yourself, whether you’re guilty of something or not. When you go through the TSA checkpoint, try pleading the 5th and see what happens. It is your right!

One other way that your 5th Amendment rights are violated at the TSA checkpoint is that you are never compensated when they steal your property. The 5th Amendment is clear that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. It doesn’t matter if that private property is a pocket knife or a bottle of water and the public use is to fill up a garbage can.

The 10th Amendment says that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. What does this mean at the TSA check point? Not a single power the TSA wields is delegated to the United States by the Constitution. Not violation of freedom of speech, infringing on the right to bear arms, searching you, seizing your property, or forcing you incriminate yourself. Every moment of every working day for every TSA agent, they are in direct violation of the Constitution, since not one thing they do is a power delegated to them by the Constitution. In fact, the rights they violate are delegated to you by the Constitution.

What should really concern you about the TSA, just as much as your constitutional rights being violated, is the fact that they put your life in danger. It’s not just that they don’t allow you to defend yourself by disarming you. Unlike the past, when you could see your family off at the gate in airports and people could wander freely throughout, now we have TSA check points creating bottlenecks of soft targets packed in like sardines. Several hundred people, packed in as tightly as possible, not in a long straight line, but in a winding, back and forth line, designed to get as many people into as small a space as possible. When it comes to mass casualties, there is no target for a terrorist that is quite as easy to take advantage of as the TSA line. Face it, you’re corralled into a tight space with several hundred people before the checkpoint. No one you are standing with has been checked yet. The muslim in front of you in line could have anything under his jacket. You don’t know and neither does the TSA. Ask the people of Brussels, Belgium how well airport security protects people in airports.

We need to demand the TSA be shut down! Not because the lines are long. Because the lines exist. The TSA is unconstitutional!

AMP (Anna Maria Perez)

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