COSI creep: or how the EU Home Office will reach into every part of your life

Daily Mail UK (Link) - Mary Ellen Synon (November 22, 2010)

In my investigation for this week�s Mail on Sunday about the shocking powers of prosecution the EU now has over all of us -- you can read it in yesterday�s blog post -- I could only include a brief warning about the sinister new committee to be set up under Article 71 of the Lisbon Treaty.

But the committee is so dangerous that it needs more than a brief warning. Here is an example of how this new Committee on Operational Co-operation on Internal Security -- known as COSI -- will be able to reach into every part of your life. Critics say it is the beginning of an EU Home Office. And it is. But it could be even worse than that.

The key lies in the vagueness the treaty gives to COSI�s powers. The committee is charged simply with ensuring �operational co-operation on internal security.� But nowhere does the treaty define �internal security.�

What the elite running the EU institutions mean when they keep something as vague as that is: �We intend to make it mean what we want to make it mean. Just sign the contract.�

Something similar has already happened with Article 122.2 (TEC), the part of the treaty barring bail-outs for member states. This article says that, despite the ban on bail-outs, if a member state is in difficulties because of �natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control,� then the European Council may grant Union assistance.

Now, any honest person would read that as meaning if Slovenia gets flattened in an earthquake, the EU can rush in some aid. In fact, earlier this year it was interpreted by the EU elite to mean permission for the �110bn bail-out given to Greece. The elite apparently decided to interpret as a �natural disaster� (because for sure it was not an �exceptional occurence�) the fact of Greece having generations of lying politicians and bent book keepers running its government. Who�da thought it, eh?

So it is reasonable to expect the same elasticity of interpretation to be given to Article 71 charging COSI with �operational co-operation on internal security.� The word �internal� and the word �security� will be stretched further than you could imagine.

Lessons about just how far activist judges in the European Court of Justice and power-hungry officials can stretch such powers can be found in the history of the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.

You can reckon that the EU elite -- who are devious and dishonest, but not stupid or ignorant -- are well aware of the Commerce Clause. Indeed, one can suspect that Article 71 was designed to be their own version of the clause.

Under the enumerated, limited powers given to the federal Congress, the framers of the US Constitution gave the Congress power �to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.� And that�s it, no more.

Leave aside the foreigners and the Indians for now. Any honest person from 1787 and well into the beginning of the 20th century would have read that to mean the Congress could make laws regulating commerce only if the commerce were between two or more States.

But a 1930s power-hungry Congress and a US Supreme Court threatened and intimidated by President FD Roosevelt used the clause to take control of almost any new power the federal government wanted.

How absurd the power-grab became can be gauged by a Supreme Court decision in the 1942 case known as Wickard v Filburn. It was one of the most important cases putting in place the big government, socialist programmes of Roosevelt�s New Deal. Wickard v Filburn was one of the cases which allowed the Washington politicians and bureaucrats to get their hands on almost every kind of commerce, almost everywhere.

In 1941, a farmer called Filburn was told by the agricultural authorities that he had permission to grow a limited amount of wheat that season. Farmer Filburn grew 239 bushels, which was more than he was told he could grow. But the wheat was never sold in any interstate commerce, indeed, it was never sold in any commerce. It was eaten by Farmer Fiburn�s own cattle.

Yet the Supreme Court agreed with the US Dept of Agriculture�s decision to penalise the farmer.

A Washington lawyer who prefers to keep his name out of my blog (shy? a Washington lawyer??) has kindly given me the short version of the decision: �The farmer grew the wheat on his own farm; the wheat never left his farm; he never sold any of it; and in fact fed it to his own animals.�

�The Court nevertheless held that this wheat �affected commerce� because if he hadn�t grown it, he would have had to buy wheat to feed his animals, and maybe the wheat the he conceivably might have had to buy would have possibly come from out of State.�

Don�t think the European Commission and the European Court of Justice aren�t precisely aware of the effect a European version of Wickard v Filburn -- or any one of dozens of other US federal government power-expanding cases -- would have on their own powers over you, your business, your investments, every part of your life. All they need to do is find a clause in the European constitution called the the Lisbon Treaty which will allow it. And there it is, Article 71 and COSI. �