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I think it is only fair that Congress also include a “Miranda warning” in the bill so that everyone is informed upfront that anything they say or write from now on may be used against them in a court of law. Of course, given the fact that 45 states already have hate crime bills, it may be a little late for that warning.

The real evil of the federal hate crimes bill is that it undermines constitutional protections against double jeopardy.

As New York University Law Professor James Jacobs, an expert on hate crimes, argues, “a federal hate-crime law would also put another nail in the coffin of our constitutional protection against double jeopardy. After all, every federal hate crime would also be a state crime, like assault, robbery, or murder. Thus, the defendants could be tried twice if special interests judged the first trial to have ended in an unjust acquittal.”

(Imagine a federal equivalent of the Duke lacrosse prosecutor, Michael Nifong).

Even Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, who wrote an influential 1992 defense of state hate crimes laws in the Harvard Law Review, told Congress that he has concerns about the prospect of dual prosecutions under the federal hate-crimes bill.

In supporting the bill, the ACLU has jettisoned principle and sacrificed civil liberties on the altar of political correctness.

Historically, the ACLU has raised concerns about federal laws against crime like the Fugitive Felon Act, citing the Constitution’s ban on double jeopardy.

The ACLU feared that the creation of federal crimes would give prosecutors two bites of the apple, enabling a federal prosecutor to indict an accused person even after a state court jury has found him not guilty of a similar state crime.

(A divided Supreme Court created a gaping loophole in the constitutional protections against double jeopardy, ruling in the Bartkus case that the double-jeopardy protection against being tried twice for the same crime only applies when both prosecutions are brought by the same unit of government, not when the first is by the state and the second is by the federal government).

The ACLU in the past declined to endorse federal hate crimes bills.

In its June 15, 2000 letter to the Senate criticizing aspects of the federal hate crimes bill, it raised the specter of “unwarranted dual prosecutions.”

Moreover, under its longstanding policy (Policy #238a), it has long claimed to oppose federal prosecutions after state court acquittals.

ACLU Board members have said that such reprosecutions may violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Now, however, the ACLU is endorsing the hate crimes bill.

And its former National Legal Director told Congress that reprosecutions of people found not guilty of hate crimes in state court are appropriate where the state prosecutors supposedly had “inadequate resources” or were of “questionable effectiveness.”

Apparently, while the ACLU believes that criminals in general should receive every constitutional protection imaginable (and many protections that have no basis in the Constitution: the ACLU opposes the death penalty, “three-strikes” laws, victims’ bills of rights, and the building of many new prisons), it believes that those accused of “hate crimes” are not entitled to the constitutional protection against double jeopardy.

The ACLU has given no reason for its unprincipled about-face.

But Southern California ACLU leader Paul Hoffman gave a possible explanation years ago in urging the ACLU to create a “civil rights exception” that would deny double-jeopardy protections to people accused of hate crimes.

Writing in the 1994 issue of the UCLA Law Review, Hoffman argued that constitutional protections against double jeopardy should be overridden in hate crimes cases, because society has a “compelling societal interest” in preventing hate crimes (by contrast, Hoffman apparently saw no compelling interest in preventing non-hate crimes, even murders).

The ACLU’s about-face on double jeopardy is similar to its prior about-face on free speech, which it now regularly attacks.

Once upon a time, the ACLU took free speech to an unbounded extreme. It sued the owners of the Alpine Village Inn for not allowing neo-Nazis to display swastikas in their restaurant, and sued a private shopping mall in Connecticut for not letting the Klan proselytize on its property.

By contrast, today’s ACLU attacks free speech, and seeks to use government power to silence “hate speech.”

Various ACLU chapters have disseminated model campus speech codes.

And in the Aguilar v. Avis Rent-A-Car System case, the ACLU argued that racial slurs are not speech, but just “verbal conduct.” In that case, it helped convince a divided California Supreme Court, in a 4-to-3 ruling, to uphold an injunction banning any use of racial slurs in a private workplace, based on racial insults that the trial judge himself conceded had stopped years earlier.

As should be clear by now, invocations such as the one by Speaker Pelosi that hate crimes contribute to “unity and equality” are false. The purpose of these criminalizations is to let whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians and others not included in the glorious diversity project know where they stand: in the groundling pit.