Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) expressed support for censoring mail if it means keeping sensitive information out of the enemy’s hands. To justify such a statement, he brought up the mail censoring operations of WWII. According to Yahoo! News:

“In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we’re all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy.”

He doesn’t think it’s necessary right now, but he would appear to wholly support it if it did become necessary. He’s been supportive of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, saying that he’s glad the NSA’s been collecting the records of Verizon customers, and that if they’re doing it to match records up to known or suspected terrorists, it’s a good thing. He did qualify that, saying that, under the law, they can’t just look at random people’s phone records; there has to be probable cause.

However, what’s truly interesting about this is that he thinks it’s okay to read and even censor Americans’ mail and monitor their phone calls, but believes that someone shouldn’t be prevented from buying a gun just because their name appears on a terrorist watch list. His logic for that is that the terrorism watch list is actually made up of several lists, and that nobody should lose their 2nd Amendment rights without the ability to challenge it just because their name is on one of those lists.

He claims there’s precedent for censoring the mail, but ignores precedents for stronger firearms legislation here, such as the bans on machine guns and other types of legislation aimed to reduce the ability of mobsters to outgun police.

The Supreme Court has routinely held that the 1st Amendment is not absolute, that there should be reasonable limitations on it. According to the Illinois 1st Amendment Center, mail censorship has fallen under what’s considered acceptable limits on freedom of speech to help prevent government subversion during wartime; hence, the mail censoring operations during WWI and WWII.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that there are limitations to the 2nd Amendment as well, in the majority opinion of Heller v. District of Columbia, a case that challenged and ultimately brought down D.C.’s ban on handgun ownership. While he did say it’s up to the Court to determine what those limits are, he maintains that it can’t be absolute.

Sen. Graham has fought against firearms legislation, such as the assault weapons ban, saying:

“The worst thing we can do is create false sense of security. Every bad event in the world can’t be fixed by government action.”

Wouldn’t this also apply to NSA surveillance and the searching and censoring of U.S. mail? He seems to have an odd sense of where government should be and where it shouldn’t be, and when the government keeps us safe and when they don’t.

Graham has taken to Twitter, however, to express his displeasure with the Yahoo! News story, saying that the story’s author, Chris Moody, is guilty of sensationalism and that Moody buried his clarification that censoring the mail isn’t necessary right now.