At 10:22 AM 3/30/2004, Eric Cordian wrote:
So of course, society's interest in protecting police officers allows New
Orleans police to search your home or business at any time, for any
reason, or for no reason at all. As long as the cop mumbles something
about making sure he's safe.
The NOLA PD spokescritter said their new powers
"will be used judiciously", which is an entertaining phrase to use
when you really mean "without asking a judge".
Similarly, society's interest in ensuring the safety of airline passengers
allows ID to be demanded and searches, and anyways, your right to freely
travel is not being impeded, because there's always Greyhound. Of course,
they can stop the bus and search everyone on it at will too.
Greyhound demands ID at some locations as well;
my brother got surprised when his trip,
which hadn't demanded ID on the way out,
got routed through Chicago on the return and they did demand ID.
These problems stem directly from the horrible mistake, many years ago in
the early days of our Republic, of letting what the Constitution says be
what the judiciary claims the Constitution says, as opposed to what the
Constitution itself states, thus giving the Judicial branch of government
absolute power over the Legislative and Executive branches.
Marbury vs. Madison was an entertainingly kinky case,
but the ability of judges to declare laws or executive actions
Unconstitutional and therefore void is the main thing that's
made the Bill of Rights effective (to the extent it has been.)
The courts have often failed in that duty, but it's rightly theirs.
The alternative would be that the Constitution means
whatever the executive branch of government says it means,
and whatever the legislature says it means,
and if the police wanted to keep you in jail and didn't
need to obey writs of habeas corpus, you'd rot in jail,
and if they didn't feel that they needed search warrants,
like they generally didn't before the Exclusionary Rule,
they wouldn't bother getting them,
and if the legislature wanted to tax something that the
Constitution didn't explicitly authorize them to tax,
they'd just tax it and you'd have no recourse
(ok, that one's not much different than today...)
As George Wallace once stated, "The country is run by thugs and federal
judges."
He was one of the thugs, of course...
