Colorado Senators Prefer Warantless Federal Raids
Reason magazine’s Mike Riggs reports that the U.S. Senate on Thursday voted 78-15 to table an amendment offered by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY.) to basically demilitarize the Food and Drug Administration. As Riggs describes it Paul’s amendment would have, among other things, “prohibited FDA employees (as well as all other Health and Human Services employees) from carrying weapons and making arrests without warrants.” The amendment would have also added a mens rea, or “guilty mind” requirement for criminal prosecution of laws and regulations the FDA enforces.
Senator Paul’s wholly legitimate beef with overreach and abuse by the FDA comes from armed FDA bureaucrats raiding Amish dairy farms, seizing property and arresting dairy farmers without warrants for selling milk directly from the cow (raw milk).
Both of Colorado’s U.S Senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennett voted in favor of tabling the amendment, and thus voted in favor of continuing warrantless raids by militarized FDA bureaucrats on farmers earning a living by engaging in peaceful commerce with willing customers.
Update: While the 15 Senators who voted in favor of due process, the Fourth Amendment and reigning in over-zealous, armed federal bureaucrats were all Republicans, a sharp eyed facebook commenter notes that 28 other Republican Senators from across the country joined with Democrats to create a supermajority in the Senate in favor of warrantless raids by the FDA. Putting Bennett and Udall in poor company indeed.
