Whose Rights ARE They, Anyway?

Answer:  They should be everyone's.

Take the right to counsel, for example, guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.  It's been in the news recently, in the context of whether it should apply to immigration detainees as well as to U.S. citizens (for example, in the New York Times).  My take on that, as an immigration lawyer?  It should apply to detainees, because it is a human right, not a civil right.  That's why it's in the Constitution in the first place.  The only reason this right and others appear to have "expanded" is simply because our understanding of the word "human" has expanded since the times of the Framers.  The right to counsel is one that, in fact, should be religiously supported by conservatives, because it is in essence the right to be protected from arbitrary state action.

Ah, if only THAT was the thing conservatives really wanted.

What they really want, of course, is a world in which they get the goldmine and everybody else gets the shaft.  This is why they love to play divide-and-conquer politics with their opponents, getting them to envy each other so that they won't focus on their common enemy.  The Times article I cited just now has an example of how this works in the context of the right to counsel:

Jon Freere, a legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization based in Washington that advocates for reduced immigration, pointed out that American citizens routinely deal with important civil matters like child custody, foreclosures or evictions without the benefit of guaranteed legal representation.

“Why should illegal aliens be guaranteed greater protections than citizens?” he asked. 

Throwing more immigration lawyers into the mix, he said, would probably slow the process only further, especially considering that immigration lawyers are always looking to expand the scope of asylum. 

Don't you just love it?  Can't have those pesky lawyers expanding human rights to make sure that more humans benefit from having them.  As for Americans "routinely" dealing with "important civil matters" on there own, this is hardly a great thing.  Pro se parties burden the legal system with their lack of legal knowledge, straining already crowded court schedules and often shafting themselves with regard to the results.  They only go to court without a lawyer because they either lack money to hire legal counsel or have too much money for legal-aid services.

But Mr. Freere, and his fellow north-bound ends of south-bound Brontosauruses (thank you, Bill James), employ the strategy outlined in that quote across the board.  Just think about there arguments about unions:  "Why should they get great salaries and benefits that most people can't get?"  Sound familiar?  Of course, most people don't get those great salaries and benefits because they were foolish enough to buy the bill of economic goods that free-marketers sold to them.

Every human being has the right to every human right, be it the right to counsel, to a decent living, or to anything else that makes a human being human.  And no one should let the Jon Freeres of the world convince them otherwise.