It’s one thing for an editor or columnist to call for censorship of bad or disfavored ideas by rounding up people who hold those ideas. It’s another thing for the attorney general to call it. I wonder if hate crime law is inacted, will it make attempted assault just as harshly punished as assault under some circumstances? Worse than that, the current bill apparently allows the federal prosecutors to try a person twice for a single act of qualifying hatred.

The US Commission on Civil Rights says the bill currently in the Senate “will do little good and a great deal of harm.” In a letter to several senators, the commissioners wrote:

“We regard the broad federalization of crime as a menace to civil liberties,” stated the commissioners. They pointed out that the loophole to “double jeopardy” exists because the authors of the Bill of Rights “never dreamed that federal criminal jurisdiction would be expanded to the point where an astonishing proportion of crimes are now both state and federal offenses.”