Donald Trump is probably not going to be known as the president who rescued the Fourth Amendment. From Lucy Steigerwald at antiwar.com:
It’s still impossible to know what president-elect Donald Trump will do. His statements over the past 18 months, and before, have often contradicted each other on issues as varied as foreign policy and transgender people using the bathroom of their choice.
On one important issue, however, Trump has been depressingly consistent. From all appearances, he does not seem to be a friend of the Fourth Amendment. But then, that puts him into the camp of the vast majority of politicians. In America we’ve managed to do a surprisingly decent job holding onto our First Amendment rights; even our Second Amendment ones have not been trashed in the same manner as our right to privacy. The Fourth Amendment is in perpetual distress thanks to the war on drugs, immigration, and terror. Police, feds, and intelligence agencies are constantly demanding more information about us in order to protect us from terrible things.
The war on drugs deeply wounded the Fourth Amendment. SWAT raids on private homes became commonplace, and continue to this day – sometimes with deadly results. Supreme Court decisions upheld everything from helicopters hovering over property, to busting doors in over marijuana smells and the sounds of movement.
New York City’s infamous Stop and Frisk program detained hundreds of thousands of people over more than a decade. The majority of them were black and Hispanic men, who were also innocent of any crime, even a nonviolent one. This program of so-called Terry Stops was legalized harassment, with a racial disparity in its execution that made the whole thing even less defensible.
To continue reading; There’s Little Reason To be Optimistic About Trump and Privacy
