The White House released a statement today saying that President Bush intends to veto H.R. 1592, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. The reasons are thus:

1. "State and local criminal laws already provide criminal penalties for the violence addressed by the new Federal crime defined in section 7 of H.R. 1592, and many of these laws carry stricter penalties (including mandatory minimums and the death penalty) than the proposed language in H.R. 1592."
2. "The Administration notes that the bill would leave other classes (such as the elderly, members of the military, police officers, and victims of prior crimes) without similar special status. The Administration believes that all violent crimes are unacceptable, regardless of the victims, and should be punished firmly."
3. "Moreover, the bill’s proposed section 249(a)(1) of title 18 of the U.S. Code raises constitutional concerns. Federalization of criminal law concerning the violence prohibited by the bill would be constitutional only if done in the implementation of a power granted to the Federal government, such as the power to protect Federal personnel, to regulate interstate commerce, or to enforce equal protection of the laws."
   

As you might expect, these reasons are totally bogus.

Charge no. 1: "We already have penalties for this!"

The administration's charge that "[s]tate and local criminal laws already provide criminal penalties for the violence addressed" in the bill are, like most Bush administration statements, technically true but also misleading. The bill amends the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to stiffen mandatory federal sentencing guidelines already in place for hate crimes to include a maximum of ten years in prison for a hate crime that involves firearms, or a life sentence for a hate crime that involves firearms and involves the death, (attempted) kidnapping, or (attempted) sexual abuse of the victim. Yes, we already have state and local penalties for hate crimes, but we already have federal penalties, too, unless the administration takes issue with the entire idea of federal hate crime legislation and not merely this amendment to existing legislation.

Charge no. 2: "Why did you leave people out?"

How many people are killed by firearms specifically because they are "elderly, members of the military, police officers, and victims of prior crimes"? Again, this amendment deals only with crimes committed using firearms. Perhaps the only exception here is one that should be made for police officers, since there really are people who want to kill police officers because they're police officers. But is this any reason to veto this legislation? Moreover, why didn't the administration work with Congress to add into the legislation what it perceives to be such an oversight?

Charge no. 3: "It's not legal!"

The administration asserts that the federal government doesn't have the authority to pass such legislation. Nevertheless, penalties for these hate crimes will only be federally valid if the person crosses state lines or uses "an instrumentality of interstate or federal commerce." I don't know what Constitution the Bush administration has been reading (probably the one which says that he has unlimited power over the government), but the one in the National Archives says that Congress has the power to regulate "interstate and foreign commerce." It has been well-established that the federal government has authority over crimes that cross state lines.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) stupidly argued that this bill is "an effort to silence people who have religious beliefs to step forward and say something is wrong." His argument (and it's the same argument that other religious leaders are making) is stupid because there are no First Amendment issues with this bill; the bill's own § 8 states that nothing therein "shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution." Merely saying, as the Westboro Baptist Church often does, that "God hates fags" does not constitute a hate crime under this Act.

Rep. Lamar Smith, also a Republican from Texas, appeared to dispell the idea that there need be hate crime legislation at all. "Justice should be blind to the personal traits of victims," he said. That would be great, if all crimes were motivated by random reasons. Unfortunately, we feel that motive is just as important as the fact that the crime took place. And we do this all the time with non-hate-motivated murder. There are three degrees of murder, for example. There's a difference between premeditated murder and unpremeditated murder. For some reason, premeditated murder is more distasteful to us, and we have harsher punishments for it than "regular" murder. So, too, is it for hate crimes: killing someone because he or she is black, a woman, homosexual, transgendered, Zoroastrian, in a wheelchair, or Albanian is more heinous than killing someone because the murderer is a psychopath or jealous.