Well, okay, it's not all bad news

In the September 13 edition of its program "State Of The Union," the BBC celebrates "the noise of democracy" by focusing on one particular issue: the TRAITOR Act. At town government meetings across America, it says,

[y]ou will hear the usual complaints about neighbours whose dogs are too loud, about roads that need to be fixed, about cops that eat too many doughnuts.

You will also hear tributes to soldiers at war and girl scouts at home.

And, most likely, you will also hear a big family fight over the Patriot Act, a law passed just after the 11 September attacks that has tested the limits of civil liberties in the United States. ...

At last count, more than 330 communities in 41 American states had passed resolutions condemning the Patriot Act.

They have been stirred by voices on the left and the right, by conservatives who fear Big Brother intrusions and liberals who raise the spectre of the FBI crashing through homes of innocent people. ...

From fishing villages in Alaska to farm towns in the Midwest to old industrial burgs in the rust belt, the Patriot Act has spurred a wave of community protest, with local political councils saying they will not cooperate with federal agents who seek to enforce the law.

The same two objections always get raised to such resolutions. One is that they're hysterical, that nothing has happened to civil liberties; two, that since they have no legal effect they're just pointless grandstanding.

For the first, I'd simply point people to the ACLU's reports on its Safe and Free site. But for the second, I'd say that yes, legally, such resolutions have no significant weight - but not none: While federal law preempts state law in most cases, the feds can't dictate the actions of, for example, local police forces and a resolution that said that police were not to cooperate with the FBI in certain investigations without authority could well pass Constitutional muster because a requirement otherwise, that is, a requirement that they cooperate, could easily be seen as violating separations of powers.

More to the real rather than the legalistic point, however, it is absurd to call these resolutions pointless - unless, that is, you're saying that statements of belief in a free nation are "pointless," that demonstrations of public opinion are "pointless," that the expression of the public will in a republic is "pointless." And indeed, too often it does seem to be. But I'd suggest that's because we don't do it enough. It's been well said that the best answer to bad speech is more speech. It can equally be said that the best answer to the "pointlessness" of public expression is more such pointlessness.

Pointless on, brothers and sisters!