Privilege Breeds Arrogance

Cynthia McKinney should be glad that Congress doesn’t meet in Los Angeles. If it did, or if Congressional offices were guarded by the LAPD, she might really have something to complain about. Of course, she might also be complaining from a hospital bed. Do you think Rodney King would have left his I.D. at home? Most people with any common sense will stop when the police ask them to and people who start throwing punches at police officers almost always end up in jail. In fact, two weeks ago I would have said anyone who starts throwing punches at police officers always ends up in jail, but Cynthia McKinney has changed all of that. It seems that if you are a member of Congress with no identification you can assault police officers without getting thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and carted off to jail, and that really isn’t right.

Imagine this scenario: You’re entering one of our nation’s Capitol buildings, you have no identification, and you’re going around the metal detector instead of through it. One of the police officers there asks you to halt. You ignore the police officer and he asks you to halt two more times. Finally, the officer places a hand on your shoulder to stop you and you start throwing punches at him. Do you think you’d be out of jail yet? Would the bruises have healed? If this scenario had occurred with some random person and the officer had broken the person’s arm during the takedown would you have felt it was justified?

The police and the metal detectors are there for a reason. They are there to keep the Capitol and the members of Congress safe. No one should be allowed to bypass them without proper identification whether they are recognized or not. For that matter, I don’t even believe that members of Congress should even be allowed to bypass them, and anyone, regardless of rank or privilege who assaults a police officer in public should go to jail immediately. The fact that Cynthia McKinney wasn’t arrested only adds to the perceived level of privilege enjoyed by our Congress and will only fuel future transgressions by them. Once the altercation was sorted out, McKinney was allowed to continue on her way and that was wrong. She should never have been allowed to enter the building unidentified without passing through the metal detector and once she hit the officer she should have been arrested whether they knew who she was or not.

McKinney may yet find herself in trouble over this event, but she still got away with it at the time. Our Congress members are not above the law and they really need to be reminded of that. Incidents like this only serve to reinforce the belief that these people, who are elected to represent us, live under a different set of rules and regulations than the rest of us. They are allowed to conduct themselves outside of the normal boundaries of the law and when they do break the rules, enforcement and punishment follow decidedly different paths for them. We shouldn’t need a Federal Grand Jury to decide if Representative McKinney did something wrong. She should have been treated like you or I would have been.

Date Added: 09-04-2006