Under CIFA, if the President declares a national cyber emergency, he may limit public access to the internet for thirty day periods renewable thereafter for three consecutive thirty day periods.  By controlling access, the President may alter what is said and who may speak. Thus, the bill enables the President to exercise the controls that can deny internet access to unwanted speakers based on their unwanted content.  There is no constitutional authority for the President to impose unilaterally a limit on access to any medium of mass communication, including the internet. CIFA is thus antithetical to the core values of the First Amendment, which depend on an unencumbered media to expose government abuse and corruption.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act adds power to FDA precisely at a time when the agency is discredited by Inspector General reports, by private assessments of its performance, and by judicial decisions against the agency. Its abuses are legion, including approval of unsafe drugs against its own medical reviewers’ objections; failure to remove unsafe drugs from the market for decades, if at all; failure to abide by federal court orders; censorship of nutrient-disease information that could save lives, and on and on.

The greatest uncertainty people fear is the unleashed regulator, unleashed by the Obama Administration with instructions to seek and destroy. They believe the new army of regulators coming out of the Obama Administration regard industry as exploitative and evil. They are undoubtedly correct, at least to the extent that career civil servants who have harbored hatred for those they regulate but have been stopped from taking adverse action by political appointees of a conservative bend now have no such barriers in their way. The rule of law, once held sacrosanct here, is now violated with impunity by federal regulatory agencies whose leaders think their missions more important than any laws that forbid their actions. They conduct under cover surveillance operations against citizens of this country, falsely representing their identities in an effort to induce violations of agency rules as a bases for prosecuting the offenders. Civil and criminal penalties can attend these violations, and many of the rules in question are either so obscure or counterintuitive as to seem incredible to those who violate them.

Drafting legislation to expand federal power has become a popular sport in Washington. It is no longer necessary for a member to have proof of a genuine problem, problems can be declared even without proof of their existence or upon the prediction that they will soon be upon us. Fiction is just as good a basis for drafting legislation as fact, or so most members who play the legislation game see it. The way it works is simple. If you are a member of the House of Representatives or the Senate, you receive a steady stream of lobbyists into your office weekly. You then decide which of those visiting has the greatest money to give to you or the greatest popular pull or, preferably, both.