Back in 2010, Ron Paul gave a rousing speech against the TSA and introduced legislation (the American Traveler Dignity Act) to protect Americans from physical and emotional abuse by federal employees conducting screenings at the nation’s airports:

Click here for the abbreviated version (with background music)

Ron Paul reintroduced the “American Traveler Dignity Act” in the current session of Congress as HR 2438.

A BILL – HR 2438

To ensure that certain Federal employees cannot hide behind immunity.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. NO IMMUNITY FOR CERTAIN AIRPORT SCREENING METHODS.

No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a Federal employee or agency or any individual or entity that receives Federal funds, who subjects an individual to any physical contact (including contact with any clothing the individual is wearing), x-rays, or millimeter waves, or aids in the creation of or views a representation of any part of an individual’s body covered by clothing as a condition for such individual to be in an airport or to fly in an aircraft. The preceding sentence shall apply even if the individual or the individual’s parent, guardian, or any other individual gives consent.

Ron Paul introduced the “American Traveler Dignity Act” with the following words. (This is a transcript of his actual speech.)

Ron Paul: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise this evening to announce that I introduced some legislation today dealing with the calamity that we have found at our airports with TSA. Something has to be done. Everybody is fed up. The people are fed up, the pilots are fed up, I’m fed up.

You know, I’ve come to this floor many times over the past many years and complained about the terrible foreign policy we’ve had, the terrible monetary policy we’ve had, the excessive spending and the debt and also the tax policy. But what we’re doing and what we’re accepting in putting up with at this airport is so symbolic of us just not standing up and saying, “Enough is enough”.

I know the American people are starting to wake up, but our government, those in charge – Congress as well as the executive branch – are doing nothing. Yes, they’re talking about maybe backing off and allowing the pilots to go through. But can you think how silly the whole thing is? The pilot has a gun in the cockpit, and he’s managing this aircraft, which is a missile, and we make him go through this groping x-ray exercise, having people feeling their underwear. It’s absurd, and it’s time we wake up.

The bill I’ve introduced will take care of this. But we have to realize that the real problem is that the American people have been too submissive, we have been too submissive. It’s been going on for a long time, and this was to be expected even from the beginning of the TSA and it’s deeply flawed. Private property should be protected by private individuals, not bureaucrats.

But the bill that I’ve introduced will take care of it. It’s very simple, it’s one paragraph long. It removes the immunity from anybody in the federal government that does anything that you or I can’t do. If you can’t grope another person and if you can’t x-ray people and endanger them with possible x-rays, you can’t take nude photographs of individuals, why do we allow the government to do it? We would go to jail. He’d be immediately arrested if an individual citizen went out and did these things, and yet we just sit there calmly and say, “Oh, they’re making us safe”.

And, besides, the argument from the executive branch is that when you buy a ticket, you have sacrificed your rights, and it is the duty of the government to make us safe. That isn’t the case. You never have to sacrifice your rights. The duty of the government is to protect our rights, not to abuse them and do what they have been doing to us. The pilots hopefully will be exempted from this.

But another suggestion I have that might help us: let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes through this. Get the x-ray and make them look at the pictures, and then go through one of those groping pat downs. And then I think there will be a difference. Have everybody in the executive branch, anybody who is a cabinet member, make them go through it and look at it. Maybe they would pay more attention.

But this doesn’t work, this is not what makes us safer, this is preposterous to think that the TSA has made us safer.

You know, when you think about it, if you look at what’s happened over the past 10 years, during this last decade, we lost 3000 on a terrible, terrible day for America. But since that time in this last decade, we have also lost 6,000 of our military personnel going over there and trying to rectify this problem. We have lost 400,000 people on our government-run highways. We have lost 150,000 individuals from homicides. So I think there’s reason to be concerned, reason to deal with this problem. We’re not dealing with it the right way, we’re doing the wrong thing, and groping people at the airport doesn’t solve our problems.

What has solved our problems, basically, has been that they put a good lock on the door and they put a gun inside the cockpit. That’s been the greatest boon to our safety. Safety should be the responsibility of the individual and the private property owner. But right now, we assume the government’s always going to take care of us and we’re supposed to sacrifice our liberties. I say that is wrong, we are not safer and we also know there are individuals who are making money of this. Michael Chertoff; I mean, here’s a guy who was the head of the TSA – selling the equipment. And the equipment is questionable; we don’t even know if it works, and it may well be dangerous to our health.

You know, the way I see this; if this doesn’t change, I see what has happened to the American people is we have accepted the notion that we should be treated like cattle. “Make us safe, make us secure, put us into barbed wire, feed us, fatten us up”, and then they’ll eat us. And we’re a bunch of cattle if we have to wait and say, “We’ve had it”. I think this whole idea of an opt-out day is just great. We ought to opt-out and make the point, get somebody to watch it and take a camera, it’s time for the American people to stand up, shrug off the shackles of our government and TSA at the airport.

These are Ron Paul’s prepared remarks:

Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, today I introduce legislation to protect Americans from physical and emotional abuse by federal Transportation Security Administration employees conducting screenings at the nation’s airports. We have seen the videos of terrified children being grabbed and probed by airport screeners. We have read the stories of Americans being subjected to humiliating body imaging machines and/or forced to have the most intimate parts of their bodies poked and fondled. We do not know the potentially harmful effects of the radiation emitted by the new millimeter wave machines.

In one recent well-publicized case, a TSA official is recorded during an attempted body search saying, “By buying your ticket you gave up a lot of rights.” I strongly disagree and am sure I am not alone in believing that we Americans should never give up our rights in order to travel. As our Declaration of Independence states, our rights are inalienable. This TSA version of our rights looks more like the “rights” granted in the old Soviet Constitutions, where freedoms were granted to Soviet citizens — right up to the moment the state decided to remove those freedoms.

The incident of the so-called “underwear bomber” last Christmas is given as justification for the billions of dollars the federal government is spending on the new full-body imaging machines, but a Government Accountability Office study earlier this year concluded that had these scanners been in use they may not have detected the explosive material that was allegedly brought onto the airplane. Additionally, there have been recent press reports calling into question the accuracy and adequacy of these potentially dangerous machines.

My legislation is simple. It establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.

I warned at the time of the creation of the TSA that an unaccountable government entity in control of airport security would provide neither security nor defend our basic freedom to travel. Yet the vast majority of both Republicans and Democrats then in Congress willingly voted to create another unaccountable, bullying agency– in a simple-minded and unprincipled attempt to appease public passion in the wake of 9-11. Sadly, as we see with the steady TSA encroachment on our freedom and dignity, my fears in 2001 were justified.

The solution to the need for security at US airports is not a government bureaucracy. The solution is to allow the private sector, preferably the airlines themselves, to provide for the security of their property. As a recent article in Forbes magazine eloquently stated, “The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility.” In the meantime, I hope we can pass this legislation and protect Americans from harm and humiliation when they choose to travel.

Statement Introducing Repeal of Sec. 1021 of National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

18 January 2012

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce a very simple piece of legislation to repeal the infamous Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, quietly signed into law by the president on New Year’s Day.

Section 1021 essentially codifies into law the very dubious claim of presidential authority under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to indefinitely detain American citizens without access to legal representation or due process of law. Section 1021 provides for the possibility of the US military acting as a kind of police force on US soil, apprehending terror suspects – including Americans — and whisking them off to an undisclosed location indefinitely. No right to attorney, no right to trial, no day in court.

This is precisely the kind of egregious distortion of justice that Americans have always ridiculed in so many dictatorships overseas. A great man named Solzhenitsyn became the hero of so many of us when he exposed the Soviet Union’s extensive gulag system. Is this really the kind of United States we want to create in the name of fighting terrorism?

Some have argued that nothing in Section 1021 explicitly mandates holding Americans without trial, but it employs vague language radically expanding the detention authority to include anyone who has “substantially supported” certain terrorist groups or “associated forces.” No one has defined what those two terms mean. What is an “associated force”?

Sadly, too many of my colleagues are too willing to undermine our Constitution to support such outrageous legislation. One senator even said about American citizens picked up under this section of the NDAA, “When they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” Is this acceptable in someone one who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution?

Mr. Speaker, of course I recognize how critical it is that we identify and apprehend those who are suspected of plotting attacks against Americans. But why do we have so little faith in our justice system? Have we not tried in civilian court and won convictions of hundreds of individuals for terrorist or related activities? I fully support our continuing to do so, but let us not abandon what is so unique and special about our system of government in the process.

I hope my colleagues will join my effort to overturn the shameful Section 1021.

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Ron Paul, Chairman of the Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee, announced today that the subcommittee will hold a hearing on legislation to restore sound money to the economy through competition.

H.R. 1098, the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2011, would allow competitive free market forces to provide sound money through choice in currency. The bill repeals federal legal tender laws, repeals restrictions on private mints, and repeals taxes on gold and silver which prevent them from circulating as forms of payment. The hearing will discuss the need for and efficacy of sound money, the means by which sound money can be achieved through measures such as H.R. 1098, and the constitutional role of government in money.

“For too long the Federal Reserve has exercised a monopoly on currency issuance,” Chairman Paul stated. “The result, predictably, has been an increasingly devalued dollar. We have been experimenting with a pure fiat currency system nationally and internationally for 40 years, and it has been proven unsound and unsustainable. Our fiat system helped create the massive debt crisis we find ourselves in, and has eroded the purchasing power of every American. The American people deserve to have a choice of currencies to protect themselves and their families from the poor decisions of government. Serious monetary reform is needed, and this hearing is the first step towards addressing this crucial issue. I am pleased that the subcommittee will be examining ways to return to sound money,” Paul continued.

The hearing, entitled “Road Map to Sound Money: A Legislative Hearing on H.R. 1098 and Restoring the Dollar,” will be held on Tuesday, September 13, at 2:00 p.m. in Room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

Witnesses scheduled to testify:

Dr. Lawrence M. Parks, Executive Director, Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education

Dr. Lawrence H. White, Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Additional witnesses to be announced.

But federal expenditures for the Vietnam War and persistent balance of payments deficits led Richard Nixon to renege to end the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold. Watch his speech below:

When Ron Paul, then a 35-year old OB/GYN who had recently left the Air National Guard and relocated to Texas, heard Nixon’s speech, he realized that what the Austrian school economists had warned against was becoming true. He would later say, “After that day, all money would be political money rather than money of real value. I was astounded.”

The same day, Ron Paul decided to go into politics. After facing defeat in his first attempt in 1974, he won a special election in April 1976 and became a Congressman representing Texas’s 22nd district. A few months later, Paul lost the general election to Democrat Robert Gammage, by fewer than 300 votes (0.2%), but defeated Gammage in a 1978 rematch, and was reelected in 1980 and 1982.

In 1988, Ron Paul ran for President on the Libertarian ticket, but lost. He returned to Congress as a Republican in 1996 and was reelected seven times, also running for President in 2008 and 2012. He is currently in his 12th and final Congressional term as he decided not to seek reelection in 2012 to focus on the presidential race.

40 years after that fateful day in August 1971, the U.S. government is bankrupt, gold is trading at $1,740 an ounce, and Ron Paul is a frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the Presidency.

In a recent interview Ron Paul had argued, “We owe $1.6 trillion to the Federal Reserve. But where did they get the money to buy our debt? Well, they created it out of thin air.

So taxpayers keep working hard to pay the interest to the Federal Reserve, as well as to finance these bonds if the Fed wants to take the monies. So I would say that is not a real debt. It’s a fictitious debt. It’s a dishonest debt, and that we’re not obligated.”

HR 2768 currently has no co-sponsors. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means. The full text of the bill will be available soon.

Today, 2012 Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul issued a statement outlining his opposition to the debt ceiling deal struck between the White House and Congress. See statement below.

Ron Paul: “While it is good to see serious debate about our debt crisis, I cannot support the reported deal on raising the nation’s debt ceiling. I have never voted to raise the debt ceiling, and I never will.

This deal will reportedly cut spending by only slightly over $900 billion over 10 years. But we will have a $1.6 trillion deficit after this year alone, meaning those meager cuts will do nothing to solve our unsustainable spending problem. In fact, this bill will never balance the budget. Instead, it will add untold trillions of dollars to our deficit. This also assumes the cuts are real cuts and not the same old Washington smoke and mirrors game of spending less than originally projected so you can claim the difference as a ‘cut.’

The plan also calls for the formation of a deficit commission, which will accomplish nothing outside of providing Congress and the White House with another way to abdicate responsibility. In my many years of public service, there have been commissions on everything from Social Security to energy policy, yet not one solution has been produced out of these commissions.

By denying members the ability to offer amendments and only allowing an up-or-down vote that will take place in the hectic time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, this Commission essentially disenfranchises the vast majority of members from meaningfully participating in the debate over reducing spending and balancing the budget. Furthermore, despite the claims of the bill’s proponents, there is nothing to stop the commission from recommending tax increases.

One of the reasons why I humbly suggest that I am the most qualified Presidential candidate is my experience to see and understand the long track record of failure, disappointments, and bad recommendations made by such commissions. Times like these require statesmanship and steady leadership, which I and the grassroots activists who have joined my campaign believe I am uniquely qualified to provide.

What should bother Americans most is that under cover of this debt ceiling circus, we learned from a recent GAO one-time, limited audit that the Federal Reserve secretly pumped $16 trillion into American and foreign banks over three years. All of the Fed’s fat cat cronies were taken care of at the expense of the American public.

To put that into perspective, our entire national debt is $14.5 trillion, and our annual deficit will be about $1.6 trillion, meaning the Federal Reserve created and appropriated more than our entire national debt to banks around the world in a few short years. We have been fighting in Congress these past few weeks over raising our debt ceiling by $2 trillion, an amount the Fed secretly gave away to just one big bank.

For decades, politicians have promised future restraint in exchange for hikes in the debt limit. We are always told that we must act immediately to avoid a crisis. But time and time again, politicians reveal themselves to be untrustworthy, and we soon find ourselves in a crisis being led by the same folks who wish only to maintain the status quo.

I believe in the great American traditions of free markets, sound money, and personal Liberty. But we are moving far away from what made us the greatest nation in human history. We must cut spending and balance our budget now, before it is too late.

Let me be clear. The cuts we must make will not be easy, and there will be difficult times in the short run. But I have the greatest confidence that if we come together as a People, work hard, and do the right things, our country will be back on track in no time and on its way to unprecedented prosperity. But, if we continue to print money and pyramid debt, we will destroy ourselves and lose the promise of America forever.

These difficult times require a President willing to stand against runaway spending. If elected, I will veto any spending bill that contributes to an unbalanced budget, and I will balance the budget in the first year of my term. I will not allow the Federal Reserve to destroy the value of our money by shoveling dollars into the pockets of its banker friends.

I remain committed to working on behalf of the American people to drastically reduce spending and implement fundamental changes that will reform government and restore our nation’s prosperity.”

More recently, I would remind my colleagues that the legislation creating the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan contained language requesting congressional action to control Medicare costs when program expenditures reached a certain “trigger.” When this trigger was reached, Congress simply passed legislation delaying the date at which Congress would have to implement the cost controls supposedly mandated by the original bill.

The claim that spending cuts in this bill equal the amount by which it increases the debt ceiling also is mistaken. First, as explained above, it is highly unlikely that Congress will abide by these caps in the future. Second, an immediate $1 trillion increase in borrowing authority does not equal a $1 trillion cut if that cut is phased in over ten years. To pretend otherwise totally ignores the time value of money, not to mention the inevitable erosion of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar as the Federal Reserve continues desperately to try to breathe life into the stagnating economy via QE 3,4,5,6, etc.

Mr. Speaker, even if Congress adheres to all the spending caps of this bill, spending still will not be reduced. This is because the “draconian cuts” contained in this bill are not really reductions in spending at all—instead the bill merely reduces future spending increases already “baked into” the Congressional Budget Office’s “baseline” budget forecasts!

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this bill is that it disenfranchises the majority of Congress by denying them the chance for meaningful participation in the crucial areas of entitlement and tax reform. It proposes to cede power to draft legislation to a special commission, hand-picked by the House and Senate leadership. We can stand assured that such leaders will pick members to serve on the commission who promote the same goals as the congressional leaders themselves!

The legislation produced by this commission will be considered via a fast-track procedure, where Members will not have the opportunity to offer any amendments. Approval of the recommendations of the “Super Congress” is tied to yet another debt ceiling increase. This guarantees that Members will face tremendous pressure to vote for whatever comes out of this commission– even if it includes tax increases.

Of course, Mr. Speaker, this commission’s mandate does not allow it to suggest cutting one penny of the trillions spent on internventionist wars and overseas adventurism.

Mr. Speaker, to those who say Congress is behaving irresponsibly if it fails to raise the debt limit, I must strongly disagree. Raising the debt limit may protect the credit rating applied to our Treasury debt in the short term, but in the long term it sends a terrible message to bond markets. It signals those markets that Washington intends to continue borrowing and spending as usual, and it is precisely this lack of serious austerity planning that will drive interest rates higher. Unless we act now to control spending, potential purchasers of our bond debt will soon demand a much higher premium to offset the very obvious risk that they will be repaid in highly depreciated dollars.

It is time to tear up the federal credit card and implement large spending cuts now, starting with overseas expenditures and unconstitutional bureaucracies. This will not only lead us to a balanced budget, but more importantly it will restore freedom and prosperity to the American people.