United Liberty
Ramos and Compean are Going Home
Mon, 01/19/2009 - 4:40pm | posted by United Liberty Staff
As one of his last acts as President, George W. Bush has commuted the sentences of Ignacios Ramos and Jose Compean, border guards convicted of the shooting of a Mexican drug dealer. Bush has been busy pardoning and commuting sentences in the last couple of months, but there didn’t seem to be any indication that Ramos and Compean would be included in the list that included several people convicted of drug felonies. Perhaps the groundswell of support for the two border guards convinced Bush to change his mind- no doubt, in the minds of their supporters, this act allows the President to end his term on a more positive note.
Well, that’s good. I remember Glenn Beck talking about this for a good while.
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
Bush’s commuting of the sentences of Ramos and Compean has been met with pretty much universal applause from conservatives (and most constitutionalists). However, the reaction among libertarians has not been so universally positive, judging from some of the blogs at lewrockwell.com. A good many libertarians favor an “open borders” approach to immigration (as indeed does the Libertarian party platform), seeing the conservative stance on the issue as a “big government” approach that doesn’t work. Likewise, these same libertarians see the whole matter of Ramos and Compean as being tied in thoroughly with the war on drugs, something that most libertarians strongly oppose. The counter argument to this, which perhaps some libertarians would be willing to admit, was that these two agents were simply trying to do the job they were charged to do, to the best of their abilities, and that their imprisonment occurred unjustly due to narrow technicalities.
In light of the overall situation, the commuting of the sentences would seem ultimately a better outcome to this particular saga, but one would hope it might give rise to a discussion of the futility of and lack of justice in the war on drugs, and lead to reforms to end the war on drugs. The war on drugs doesn’t work and has done great damage to constitutional protections. Furthermore, the whole drug war has seriously complicated the whole immigration issue. Without the federal drug laws, it could well likely be that we would have a lot less of the perceived immigration problems that fuel so much of the political debates taking place in Washington.
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