Remember what happened with the Supreme Court in the past year? Remember how the Democratic Party promised to oppose judges who would rule against the civil liberties of American citizens? Remember how they buckled twice to permit John Roberts and Samuel Alito onto the Supreme Court, despite ample evidence of the nominees’ anti-citizen, anti-liberty biases?
Well, now we see the results. This is what you get when you have a Republican president and a failure of Democratic Party leadership:
A divided Supreme Court said Thursday that police with search warrants who barged into homes without knocking didn’t risk having evidence they uncovered tossed out at trial, a ruling that civil liberties advocates called a major blow to privacy protections….
Yes, the so-called knock-and-announce rule is violated when police fail to announce their presence and wait a reasonable amount of time before entering someone’s home. But no, that violation isn’t sufficiently related to what they find during a search to justify banning drugs, guns or any other evidence that’s uncovered from later criminal proceedings….
To exclude evidence from a trial merely because of an entry violation, the court said, would unnecessarily increase the risk of “grave, adverse” consequences, including the technical exoneration of guilty – and often dangerous – criminals.
That’s right: the police can burst into your home — your own private space — without warning. And, even though it is a violation of law to do so, any evidence the police so obtain could be used anyway. This means, effectively, that there’s nothing to stop the police from going ahead and violating the law to gain evidence from you and your home. Nothing except, as Antonin Scalia pointed out, the high standards of the police force itself.
Two things to notice:
1. The court’s opinion places government prerogatives and needs at a higher priority than the rights of the individual citizen. This is Big Government Thinking at its worst, and supports the emergence of a Police State — which is what the Constitution was written to prevent.
2. Who are the Big Government justices that constituted this narrow 5-4 voting majority? Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito. All of these Big Government, Police State justices were nominated by Republican presidents and supported by Republican legislators. Tell this to your friendly neighborhood Republican party hack the next time they try to say the Republican party is the party of Small Government.
We’ve known for a long time that the Republican party is uninterested in civil liberty. But John Roberts and Samuel Alito were permitted to join the court without a filibuster thanks to decisions by the leadership of the Democratic Party. Tell that to the nice employee of the Democratic National Committee or other party-level organization the next time they ask you to fork over your money so the Democrats win, win, win in 2006 and protect your rights. Then ask them where they the party leadership was in 2005 and listen to them squirm and squawk. Then, silent as the dawn, hang up.
