...and sometimes the "powertripping" is on the part of the passenger.

That's not how law works. You can't just assume something is true because no court has "specifically" said otherwise.

While courts have ruled that there is a right to travel, they have not said that it includes the right to travel by any mode. To take an example, some people have challenged the practice of requiring driver's licenses and registration fees to drive. Courts have upheld those things because, while you have the right to travel, you could always walk or take the bus, and therefore requiring a driver's license doesn't infringe on your right to travel.

I didn't introduce the "specifically" canard.

The nexus between rights and the Constitution has been discussed several times here; I'm not about to get into it again.

Really? What could a passenger do that would remotely be power tripping? Pushing back to an Airport Security Screener isn't power tripping it is simply asserting one's rights. Nothing a pax can do comes close to DY...T.

ETA . . . Guess I'll just spell out do you want to fly today since the board does an auto edit

While this makes sense in a superficial way, one must consider the implications of broad application. TSA says they control my right o travel by air and invoke several means to enforce that, NFL for example. That is fine, I can take the train or drive. But, if my right to travel by air can be infringed upon, while not to travel by rail or bus? After all, if I am dangerous on a airplane with other passengers, I should be dangerous on a train or bus. I could always drive, but as said above, that privilege can be revoked for any of a number of reasons.

It boils down to this, allowing the power to revoke a means of travel for capricious or dubious reasons allows the power to revoke any means of travel. It just has to be done and the argued persuasively in front of a court.

I'll share a true story and it made quite a stir when it happened. I grew up in a very small town of 300 people. We had a town drunk. He would drive the 1/2 mile into town to get his mail and such. He would get stopped. He eventually lost his license. Reasonable. He started riding his lawnmower. He was arrested and fought it and won. The legislature changed the law so any motor vehicle was covered. So he bought a horse. Judges ruled the horse was a motor vehicle under the now vague statute. (He actually was quite dangerous on the horse as he could not control it.) He tried walking and was arrested for public intoxication. In the end, he just stayed home and had people bring him what he needed.

There is a point: a government that has the power to limit one mode of travel has the power to limit any mode. Wally Bird makes this point in his use of citations. Absent a known and demonstrable danger to fellow travelers or the mode of transportation, it should be that the private contract into which I enter with a company to provide a travel service can not be arbitrarily or effectively canceled by government force, coercion or inaction.

That is how it should be. That is not how it is.

IMO it's several inter-woven factors all colliding to create the mess that is TSA. (Pop psychology time! :D )

Americans are indoctrinated from birth to obey authority figures. They are culturally disposed to process solutions to the point that process becomes the solution, to the detriment of whatever the original goal might have been. (Think how many times you've heard "Those are the rules." in response to a situation that is outside the rules). Add in that TSA on the management side is made of people that are ex-US military and other government departments: they're not creative or (generally) intelligent people and take a militaristic POV (rather than security POV (& the number of times that Americans just respond blankly to that statement is scary)) to process and action. At the front end of TSA, you get a wide range of people that are frequently intellectually & emotionally unable to do the job required. While they're given (the wrong) processes and procedures to follow in a sort of faux McDonalds-fication of "security", they get no strong or even clear management direction or support in applying it all. As a result, you get a version of the "guards psychology" coming into play where the guards run wild. TSA reflexively defends them because it doesn't have the management structures or desire in place to monitor or correct mis-action, so it just feeds on itself.

I'm always concerned when we agree on something. :)

There's a right to be a loud mouthed jerk? A right to throw a fit in public and delay everybody behind you in line?

Not all TSO's are rude or inappropriate. Some are even calm and reasonable. My last trip out of PHL a pax ahead of me began SCREAMING at the TSO who had said in normal tone of voice "Please put your laptop in a bin, sir." - which is SOP for sending it through the x-ray machine. The guy in line began the whole DYKWIA and screaming about the government sequester.

You might consider screaming at a TSO to be "simply asserting one's rights" but I consider such behavior to power/ego tripping to a sick degree. The TSO did nothing to merit such a treatment, and abusing front line staff because Congress can't agree is uncalled for.

I would think it's the exact opposite. Americans are indoctrinated from birth to question their government on everything. They are taught that they have all kinds of "rights" (which may or may not actually exist), that the government is out to oppress them, and that they are supposed to keep the government small and weak in order to ensure their freedoms. They are taught that the government might become "tyrannical" at any minute, and the right to bear arms is their line of defense. They are taught to worship the free market and question socialism, communism, and anything else that is un-American in any way, mostly without having a clue what those terms mean.

This skepticism of the government is why the US lacks a decent health care system, better environmental protections, and many other things that are taken for granted in most other developed nations.

But of course. :)

We're really going off topic here, aren't we? I'm hope the mods will indulge us a bit while we're being reasonable about the how aspect of that.

I think you've got the tone (below) right. But I would disagree about the substance. I agree that many Americans believe exactly what you say. That's how the perceive themselves. But I don't think that's the reality. (Obviously I don't or I wouldn't have written what I did :) )



OK, I do agree with that part just above. :)


I'm not convinced that that's the reason on those ones. I think that it might well be the reason these days with the extreme right screaming as loud as it can about how it's "being repressed" & the "liberal media" is to blame, yadda yadda, pick-your-stalking-horse. But that, IMO, is just the modern effect/reason. Historically, it's a simple outgrowth of the form of government the US has. The distributed federal system of the US makes progress in a technological context more difficult in so far as the system of government simply isn't scalable IMO. It breaks down when the parts become large and able to communicate effectively. The system was designed to cope with a lack of communication, not a surplus of it. The money and power sloshing about as well just serve to attract the sharks faster and they make sure it's doing their bidding and not "the people's."

To bring all that back towards the actual discussion, I think that's one of the reasons why TSA & DHA (& modern US government in general) is so ineffective. It's so large and has so many inputs that it can't generate a coherent output. People in the US don't actually want (or at least about) their government departments being small and effective, and yet it's complicated enough and large enough (in terms of people, money, physical distance, etc) that it is still easy to hide/get away with all sorts of things. The cumulative effect of all the inputs over the last ~150 years is the modern US government & population: distinctly bipolar. All IMO, obviously. :)

Ego trip and power trip are not synonyms.