Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I note with the delight that the hip and cool Rachel Maddow is now up in arms about "terrorism":

Rachel Maddow: Right-Wing Terrorism Must Be Stopped

The tactics of anti-choice extremists are designed to change policy by terrorizing Americans. How do we stop them from committing violent acts?

We begin tonight with another deadly act of domestic terrorism....

And [last Sunday], George Tiller was shot.... inside his church in Wichita. He was killed instantly. A man named Scott Roeder is the suspect in custody in this case. He‘s known in extremist anti-abortion circles....

What‘s the strategy to stop them?

Joining us now is Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University.

I wanted to ask you tonight if it‘s legally appropriate, legally useful, to approach this problem as terrorism?

Murder has been a crime for a long time -- since Sinai and before, actually -- but that doesn't suffice for Rachel, any more than it does for the capi of the gigantic and still growing incarceration sector. For her as for them, the job long since ceased to be about catching criminals and punishing them. Rather, the job is crime prevention -- "how do we stop" people from doing bad things?

Now a little reflection quickly reveals that this is a much bigger task than the old after-the-fact, catch-'em-and-lock-'em-up mission. For one thing, it requires quite a lot of monitoring, well before anybody commits an actual crime:

MADDOW: To the extent that there is a movement that this man saw himself as part of, and I spent a lot of time in very dark corners of the Web today looking at the websites and publications ...

To the extent that there is something beyond the loner, the lone murderer here, to the extent that there is a rhetorical association, there are organizations that support this sort of thing, does it give law enforcement any additional tools to consider them while they prosecute this crime? ... Are there law enforcement tools that would be useful in these cases to acknowledge those ties?

... We collect intelligence on foreign bodies. In terms of what we do domestically to disrupt homegrown terrorist plots, to disrupt criminal enterprises, to break up organized crime in these efforts, there‘s—I mean, there‘s civil liberties concerns, there‘s also strategic concerns about how these things can be done legally on American soil.