How the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were gutted, by Eric Peters on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
America is in trouble because Americans got lazy. Not so much physically but morally. They began to care more about some passing thing than about the things that truly matter; the things that made America unlike other places.
Better than other places.
Things like principles; the plain meaning of words. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments, especially. Which were (past tense deliberate) laws written to articulate and protect principles that matter.
It gradually became more important to – as Thomas More’s character in the play, A Man For All Seasons put it – cut down all the “trees” (laws) that sheltered the individual for the sake of making things easier for the government.
For example, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches – defined in sane terms and plain English as any non-specific search of people at random, who’ve not done anything to suggest they may have committed a crime. Fishing expeditions, in other words.
The idea was that the government should have to – in the first place – substantiate suspicion. It wasn’t enough for a cop to say – I don’t like your looks. He had to be able to articulate some definite thing (evidence) that gave him reason to believe you had committed or were about to commit a crime.
Today, cops stop people at random, without any specific cause at all. Without even having to say they don’t like their looks. It is enough thatthey are cops. And that you are not.
To continue reading: How We Got To Here
