WASHINGTON (CN) — Civil libertarians are quick to voice due-process concerns about denying guns to people on the no-fly list. Their movement has an unlikely symbol in the iconic congressman who led last week's sit-in for gun control.
Before he could get his name removed from the list, Rep. John Lewis was stopped at airports about 40 times in 2004, a representative for the Georgia Democrat's office confirmed in an email.
Last week, Lewis rallied fellow House Democrats around the slogan "no fly, no buy," during a dramatic 25-hour sit-in on the House floor that ultimately failed to force a vote on the issue.
The legislation is a complicated one for advocates of civil liberties.
"If you ask should terrorists be able to buy guns? Of course they shouldn't," said Ilya Shapiro with libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. "But the devil is in the details."
When it comes to government watch lists, Shapiro summed up the details as Kafkaesque, secretive and vague.
"The problem with all of these lists is that it's unclear how you get on them, and how the government decides to put someone on them," Shapiro said in an interview. "And it's even less clear how you get off."
People sometimes find out when they cannot board a plane, or get repeatedly stopped for extra screening, like Lewis did, but groups like Cato and the American Civil Liberties Union note that most people lack the wherewithal to get off the list.
"There's no set standard way to challenge it," Shapiro said. "You often don't even know you're on one of these lists."
The Senate could yet vote on a bipartisan gun-control compromise put forth by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to bar people on the no-fly and selectee watch lists.
Though the measure failed last week, its performance in a test vote means the Senate could vote again on it later.
The Collins Amendment contains a provision that would let people challenge denials in an appeals court, and its supporters say the burden will be on the government to substantiate the denial.
But the ACLU says it lacks even basic due-process protections. In a letter to the Senate last week, the group complained that that the amendment strips U.S. district courts of jurisdiction and relegates challenges to the federal courts of appeal, where petitioners have little opportunity to challenge a "largely secret and one-sided administrative record."
Unavailable to watch-list challengers, according to the letter, are the protections of the Classified Information Procedures Act, which balances the need to protect classified information with a defendant's right to see the evidence against them.
Courts would have the power under the Collins Amendment to let a petitioner access classified information, but the information might remain secret anyway if the attorney general objects, according to the ACLU's June 22 letter.
A Look at the Lists
Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, said the U.S. government uses three lists to designate known and suspected terrorists: the terrorist-screening database, the no-fly list and the selectee list. The latter pegs people for additional screening at places like airports.