Bill Barr, civil liberties, and sedition

 It's interesting that this news:

Attorney General William Barr drew criticism after calling lockdown measures aimed at controlling the spread of COVID-19 the worst infringement on civil liberties other than slavery.

Came down at the same time as this news:

William Barr told prosecutors to explore aggressive charges against people arrested at recent demonstrations across the US, even suggesting bringing a rarely used sedition charge, reserved for those who have plotted a threat that posed imminent danger to government authority, according to multiple reports on Wednesday.

Barr's interest in civil liberties is ... situational, shall we say.

There is no right to commit vandalism of and destruction to government property, of course, but there's a reason sedition charges are rarely used: They've often been used in American history to tamp down legitimate dissent.

This was notoriously the case under President John Adams. Jill Lepore, in her book THESE TRUTHS, wrote about his use of a sedition law to punish political opponents:

Sedition laws were also used abusively around World War I.

Though Wilson and Congress regarded the Sedition Act as crucial in order to stifle the spread of dissent within the country in that time of war, modern legal scholars consider the act as contrary to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, namely to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. One of the most famous prosecutions under the Sedition Act during World War I was that of Eugene V. Debs, a pacifist labor organizer and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who had run for president in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908 and 1912 on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

After delivering an anti-war speech in June 1918 in Canton, Ohio, Debs was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Sedition Act. Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court ruled Debs had acted with the intention of obstructing the war effort and upheld his conviction. In the decision, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the earlier landmark case of Schenck v. United States (1919), when Charles Schenck, also a Socialist, had been found guilty under the Espionage Act after distributing a flyer urging recently drafted men to oppose the U.S. conscription policy.

I don't envy the politicians who have tried -- not always successfully -- to balance the requirements of public health with the obligations of protecting civil liberties. But they have been working (despite criticisms) to protect public health, not to punish their enemies. Sedition laws are generally used to punish acts committed in the name of some sort of wrongthink. To me, at least, that's a more dangerous kind of civil liberties violation. It also happens to be the kind that Attorney General Bill Barr endorses.