Five-dollar registration fee for persons planning to overthrow US government
Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.
The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”
There’s even a $5 filing fee.
By “subversive organization,” the law means “every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State.”
A PDF of the registration form can be found here, courtesy of FitsNews.
The law also gives subversive organizations “subject to foreign control” 30 days to register with the state after setting up shop in South Carolina.
While the intention of the law is apparently aimed at Islamic terrorists, it’s unclear in the law’s wording whether it can be applied to right-wing militias, some of whom have reputedly called for the overthrow of the US government. The law states that “fraternal” and “patriotic” groups are exempt from the law, but only if they don’t “contemplate the overthrow of the government.”
While the law is clearly redundant — there are plenty of statutes at the state and federal level through which terrorists can be prosecuted — it reflects a not-uncommon pattern in some states of “doubling down” against particular crimes.
For instance, South Carolina is among those states which require drug dealers to declare their illegal income, or face additional criminal penalties on top of the already established penalties for buying, possessing and selling drugs.
The South Carolina blog FitsNews describes the new law as “bureaucracy for terrorists.”
“In the long and storied history of utterly retarded legislation in South Carolina, we may have finally found the legal statute that takes the cake for sheer stupidity, which we think you’ll agree is saying something,” the unsigned blog posting scathingly commented.
2 Comments
OK! I (probably not unlike yourself) have finally stopped laughing.
I keep waiting for the punchline… I’m still waiting
As I pondered the idiocy of this it occurred to me that this thing really does have teeth. In fact this may be the most detrimental action ever taken against the “protest movement”.
I hope it is a given that no one in their right mind would register themselves as a subversive – I hope I can say that.
What happens now when a local patriot group shows up and conducts a tea party at the local court house and Law Enforcement comes in and starts checking “subversive registration files” and you being smart enough to not turn over your 5th amendment right to not self-incriminate, you are approached by said Law enforcement and they say I’m sorry sir or ma’am I’m afraid you have failed to register under the subversive registration act and your involvement in this action is in violation. I am now placing you under arrest.
After you stop rolling around on the floor LYAO and the smoke finally settles you may like to take a more objective look at this legislation and its potential effects on our already dwindling civil liberties.
Yes, it’s funny, except that it’s really not.
It’s not a far step from this, where you have to register yourself if you’re a subversive, to having that registration done for you. The US is teetering happily down a well worn historical path here and it may not like where it ends up. Given all the McCarthyite crap that’s been going on in the past couple of years, this isn’t much of a surprise to me. In the past, all it took was someone to rip the clothes off that particular bugbear to show it up for what it was but this time around? When you’ve got so many people slavishly – and that’s not a term I use lightly – willing to do the bidding of whatever screecher pops up on the TV, it’s going to take a mite more than that, I’d wager.
Rights and civil liberties? That could soon be a thing of memory, if some people have their way.