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Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights Review"Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" is the question Eddie (Walter Brennan) likes to ask in the Bogart-Bacall movie To Have and Have Not. The answer is "Yes Indeed!" as Molly Ivins shows in her posthumous book. But I don't really think of her as a bee, but maybe a Texas-size horsefly biting the backsides of those who would erode our freedoms, or perhaps a vigilant bulldog protecting the tree of liberty. Perhaps also "The wronging of rights and the righting of wrongs" might be appropriate here.
This is a book of episodes, stories about instances of where the Bill of Rights comes under assault. Many of the basic tales are familiar, but many are not, and putting these stories together helps give a better picture of the whole: we've been seeing a piecemeal erosion of freedoms done in the name of freedom. There has been no sudden assault on the tree of liberty by a dozen men with chainsaws, but rather more subtle attacks--slashes with hatchets done in the night. But Molly was never willing to accept any kind of assault. When you read the stories you realize that many of the instances didn't seem like such a big deal at the time--but they were to Molly. She quotes Niemoller's comment about Hitler: Hitler went after the communists, then the Jews, then the Catholics, and each time he didn't speak up because he wasn't one of them. Then when they came for him there was no one left to speak up for him. The same thing, of course, occurred under Stalin, and Molly reminds us that when we watch others having freedoms eroded and do nothing, we are in danger ourselves--that was her passionate concern, and it's one of her primary concerns in this book.
Molly is outraged by a lot of the things that are happening, but she has always been a writer of charm and humor. She writes of how war protesters in Crawford, Texas, were (are) regarded as essentially being terrorists, and how the police chief said that if someone walked down the street alone with a political button on his or her shirt that he didn't agree with, then he could arrest them for illegal protest. There is also a lengthy piece about a reporter in San Francisco who spent 199 days in jail for refusing to testify and turn over video footage. (This is not a tale I recall ever hearing of). During a disturbance, a taillight on a police cruiser was broken. Police departments get federal grants, and so the Feds got involved. The Feds insisted that the reporter testify about what he had seen and turn over all video footage. It sounds nonsensical, trivial, and a supremely idiotic waste of time for the Feds to get involved over a taillight, but the reporter still spent 6 months in jail, and Molly was outraged.
"We had to destroy it in order to save it" is a phrase we sometimes hear in wars, but even though it isn't being phrased quite that bluntly, it is being said about freedoms. Molly's book is about this: she's been our champion and stalwart defender, our watchdog. We'll miss her insights, her humor, and her outrage at wronged rights.
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