Ever wondered about the constitutional basis for random DUI checkpoints? There isn’t any, but they do it anyway, and the courts have blessed them. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
Back in the ’50s, there was something called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was chaired by a Senator named Joe McCarthy. We could have used such a committee in the 1980s, when one of the most un-American activities shy of the income tax became part of American life. That’s actually much too passive. When it was imposed on Americans.
I mean what are styled “sobriety checkpoints.”
In the first place, a “checkpoint” is about as un-American as it gets. A “checkpoint” was once a characteristic feature of authoritarian countries, the old Soviet Union as a for-instance. Americans used to watch movies depicting life in the old Soviet Union, which routinely featured “checkpoints.” At which people – the poor people! – were compelled to produce their “papers” and given a once-over by ominous government agents. Americans never imagined (once upon a time) that America would become a land of “checkpoints” also. They are now so habituated to them that they consider them perfectly normal. Just as those poor people in the movies did. Except they really didn’t. It was always evident in those movies that the people forced to endure the “checkpoints” were being degraded and resented it.
Papers please comrade, fweedom fwies check.
No shirking, we’re all in this together.
Go F’ yourself.