House Passes Bill to Microchip Citizens

House Overwhelming Passes Bill to Microchip Citizens with Mental Disabilities

Call it the “Mark of the Beast,” or a massive step forward in governmental control over people’s lives, the planting of micro-chip tracking devices in humans is a very controversial issue.  The fear is that, like most government programs, what starts off as small and relatively unobtrusive eventually grows into a monstrosity.  The income tax would be a perfect example.

Thus far, we have a bill that overwhelming passed in the House of Representatives to implant micro-chips into people who have mental disorders that might cause them to get lost or disappear thereby endangering themselves.  The hope would be that the chip would enable officials to locate such persons before they might suffer injury.

While it is difficult to argue against measures that might help those with disabilities, the question is whether the definition of those to be chipped might be expanded to include vastly larger segments of the population — in the interest of their own safety, of course.

H. R. 4919 would also require the attorney general to consult with the secretary of health and human services and other health organizations to come up with best practices for the tracking devices.  Cited as the “Kevin and Avonte’s Law of 2016”, this bill is ambiguous and gets into some serious gray areas.

As mentioned, this bill passed in the House with overwhelming bi-partisan support.

It has yet to be passed in the Senate.

Rep. Gohmert of Texas spoke against the bill on the floor of the House.

“While this initiative may have noble intentions, ‘small and temporary’ programs in the name of safety and security often evolve into permanent and enlarged bureaucracies that infringe on the American people’s freedoms. That is exactly what we have here. A safety problem exists for people with Alzheimer’s, autism and other mental health issues, so the fix, we are told, is to have the Department of Justice, start a tracking program so we can use some device or method to track these individuals 24/7.”

This is a real danger, not just in the expansion of governmental surveillance power that this portends, but also the likelihood that the initiative will take the typical path of starting small and growing into something that presents a real danger to our liberties.

 

How your Congressmen from the American Redoubt voted:

Washington
Yea   D DelBene, Suzan WA 1st
Yea   D Larsen, Rick WA 2nd
Yea   R Herrera Beutler, Jaime WA 3rd
Yea   R Newhouse, Dan WA 4th
Yea   R McMorris Rodgers, Cathy WA 5th
Yea   D Kilmer, Derek WA 6th
Yea   D McDermott, Jim WA 7th
Yea   R Reichert, David WA 8th
Yea   D Smith, Adam WA 9th
Yea   D Heck, Denny WA 10th
Idaho
Nay   R Labrador, Raúl ID 1st
Yea   R Simpson, Mike ID 2nd
Montana
Yea   R Zinke, Ryan MT
Wyoming
Nay   R Lummis, Cynthia WY
Oregon
Yea   D Bonamici, Suzanne OR 1st
Yea   R Walden, Greg OR 2nd
Yea   D Blumenauer, Earl OR 3rd
Yea   D DeFazio, Peter OR 4th
Yea   D Schrader, Kurt OR 5th

 

H/T Truth and Action