Tag Archives: Fourth Amendment

The Bill of Temporary Privileges, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on September 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Fourth Amendment is a dead letter. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Earlier in the summer, the Director of National Intelligence, the data-gathering and data-concealing arm of the American intelligence community masquerading as the head of it, revealed that in 2021, the FBI engaged in 3.4 million warrantless electronic searches of Americans. This is a direct and profound violation of the right to privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

For the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has characterized electronic surveillance as a search that can only be conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, which itself must be presented under oath to the judge. The warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

By failing to comply with these constitutional requirements, the FBI violated the natural and constitutionally protected right to be left alone of millions of Americans.

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The Bill of Temporary Privileges, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on May 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

The federal government would like to disabuse you of the notion that “rights” are permanent and immutable, a condition that comes not from the government but from God and the requirements of human existence. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Last week, the Director of National Intelligence, the data-gathering and data-concealing arm of the American intelligence community masquerading as the head of it, revealed that in 2021, the FBI engaged in 3.4 million warrantless electronic searches of Americans. This is a direct and profound violation of the right to privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

For the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has characterized electronic surveillance as a search that can only be conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, which itself must be presented under oath to the judge. The warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

By failing to comply with these constitutional requirements, the FBI violated the natural and constitutionally protected right to be left alone of millions of Americans.

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Using War to Assault Freedom, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on April 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

The War on Drugs shredded the Fourth Amendment. The Ukraine-Russia war is shredding the Fifth amendment. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Most judges and lawyers agree that the war on drugs in the past 50 years has seriously diminished the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

Now a small group of legal academics is arguing that the war in Ukraine should be used to diminish property rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

Here is the backstory.

The Fourth Amendment was written to guarantee that the government may only search and seize persons, houses, papers and effects pursuant to a search warrant issued by a judge after the presentation under oath of evidence demonstrating that the place to be searched more likely than not contains evidence of crime. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

These requirements — the work of James Madison, who was the scrivener of the Constitution in 1787 and the author of the Bill of Rights in 1791 — were intended to have two effects.

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Jackboots Policing: No-Knock Raids Rip a Hole in the Fourth Amendment, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on April 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

The SWAT teams have gone wild and run roughshod over the Constitution. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“We’re all potential victims.”—Peter Christ, retired police officer

It’s the middle of the night.

Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep.

Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you.

You’re not just afraid. You’re terrified.

Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat has invaded your home, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need.

You brace for the confrontation.

Shadowy figures appear at the doorway, screaming orders, threatening violence.

Chaos reigns.

You stand frozen, your hands gripping whatever means of self-defense you could find.

Just that simple act—of standing frozen in fear and self-defense—is enough to spell your doom.

The assailants open fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Governments, Law, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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Supreme Court Unanimously Rebuffs Biden Administration on Warrantless Searches for Handguns, by Matthew Vadum

Posted on May 17, 2021 | 1 comment

The community care-taking exception will not be allowed to swallow the Fourth Amendment with regard to handguns. From Matthew Vadum at theepochtimes.com:

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Biden administration arguments in a case from Rhode Island that police should be allowed to enter homes without a warrant to seize handguns.

The ruling in the case, Caniglia v. Strom, court file 20-157, came May 17.

Erich Pratt, Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America and the affiliated Gun Owners Foundation, praised the new decision.

“The Supreme Court today smacked down the hopes of gun grabbers across the nation,” Pratt said.

“The Michael Bloombergs of the world would have loved to see the Supreme Court grant police the authority to confiscate firearms without a warrant. But the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourth Amendment protections in the Bill of Rights protect gun owners from such invasions into their homes.”

Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, is an activist and major funder of gun-control groups.

The case came before the high court for oral argument two months ago as President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats began pressing for aggressive new restrictions on Second Amendment gun ownership rights, including controversial “red flag” laws, which allow gun seizures from law-abiding gun owners with limited due process, in the wake of highly publicized deadly mass shootings in March at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket and at Atlanta-area spas.

Police generally cannot conduct searches of private property without consent or a warrant.

In Cady v. Dombrowski the Supreme Court held in 1973 that police may conduct warrantless searches related to “community caretaking functions,” but only for “vehicle accidents.” Since then, the principle has become “a catchall for a wide range of responsibilities that police officers must discharge aside from their criminal enforcement activities,” the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals stated in the Caniglia case.

The community caretaking doctrine holds that police don’t always operate as law enforcement officials investigating wrongdoing, but sometimes as caretakers to prevent harm in emergency situations.

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Biden Administration Urges Supreme Court To Let Cops Enter Homes And Seize Guns Without A Warrant, by Nick Sibilla

Posted on March 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Biden administration wants the Supreme Court to expand an exception to the Fourth Amendment in a way that would swallow it up. From Nick Sibilla at forbes.com:

he U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear oral argument in Caniglia v. Strom, a case that could have sweeping consequences for policing, due process, and mental health, with the Biden Administration and attorneys general from nine states urging the High Court to uphold warrantless gun confiscation. But what would ultimately become a major Fourth Amendment case began with an elderly couple’s spat over a coffee mug.

In August 2015, 68-year-old Edward Caniglia joked to Kim, his wife of 22 years, that he didn’t use a certain coffee mug after his brother-in-law had used it because he “might catch a case of dishonesty.” That quip quickly spiraled into an hour-long argument. Growing exhausted from the bickering, Edward stormed into his bedroom, grabbed an unloaded handgun, and put it on the kitchen table in front of his wife. With a flair for the dramatic, he then asked: “Why don’t you just shoot me and get me out of my misery?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tactic backfired and the two continued to argue. Eventually, Edward took a drive to cool off. But when he returned, their argument flared up once again. This time, Kim decided to leave the house and spend the night at a motel. The next day, Kim phoned home. No answer.

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Home Invasions: All the Ways the Government Can Lay Siege to Your Property, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on March 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Fourth Amendment and a big chunk of the Fifth Amendment are virtually dead letters. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and … forcibly enter?”—Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lone dissenter in Kentucky v. King

Americans are not safe in their homes.

Not anymore, at least.

This present menace comes from the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

The weapons of this particular war on our personal security and our freedoms include an abundance of laws that criminalize almost everything we do, a government that views our private property as its own, militarized police who have been brainwashed into believing that they operate above the law, courts that insulate police from charges of wrongdoing, legislatures that legitimize the government’s usurpations of our rights, and a populace that is so ignorant of their rights and distracted by partisan politics as to be utterly incapable of standing up to the government’s overreaches, incursions and power grabs.

This is how far the mighty have fallen.

Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting home invasions in order to pursue traffic violators, seize lawfully-owned weapons, carry out knock-and-talk “chats” with homeowners in the dead of night, “prevent” individuals from harming themselves, provide emergency aid, intervene in the face of imminent danger, serve as community caretakers, chase down individuals suspected of committing misdemeanor crimes, and anything else they can get away with.

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Repeal the Patriot Act, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on March 5, 2020 | 1 comment

By any reading of the plain words of the Constitution, which is not how contemporary jurists read the Constitution, the Patriot Act is unconstitutional and should be repealed. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

I have been writing for years about the dangers to human freedom that come from government mass surveillance. The United States was born in a defiant reaction to government surveillance. In the decade preceding the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the villains were the Stamp Act and the Writs of Assistance Act. Today, the villain is the Patriot Act.

Here is the backstory.

In 1765, when the British government was looking for creative ways to tax the colonists, Parliament enacted the Stamp Act. That law required all persons in the colonies to purchase stamps from a British government vendor and to affix them to all documents in one’s possession. These were not stamps as we use today, rather they bore the seal of the British government. The vendor would apply ink to the seal and for a fee — a tax — impress an image of the seal onto documents.

All documents in one’s possession — financial, legal, letters, books, newspapers, pamphlets, even posters destined to be nailed to trees — required the government stamps.

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A Primer on Domestic Spying, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on February 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

The Fourth Amendment lies in complete ruins. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

“The Framers … conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.” — Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)

While we were all consumed by impeachment, a pernicious piece of legislation was slowly and silently making its way through Congress. It is a renewal of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act of 2001 has three sections that are scheduled to expire on March 15. One of those sections is the infamous 215, which authorizes the federal government to capture without a warrant all records of all people in America held by third parties.

Do we really want the federal government to spy without warrants? How can Congress, which has sworn to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, legislate such a blatant violation of it? Here is the backstory.

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More Spying and Lying, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on August 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Trump administration is trying to make permanent the same unconstitutional spying authority that was used on Trump and the Trump campaign! From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

While most of us have been thinking about the end of summer and while the political class frets over the Democratic presidential debates and the aborted visit of two members of Congress to Israel, the Trump administration has quietly moved to extend and make permanent the government’s authority to spy on all persons in America.

The president, never at a loss for words, must have been asked by the intelligence community he once reviled not to address these matters in public.

These matters include the very means and the very secret court about which he complained loud and long during the Mueller investigation. Now, he wants to be able to unleash permanently on all of us the evils he claims were visited upon him by the Obama-era FBI and by his own FBI. What’s going on?

Here is the backstory.

After the lawlessness of Watergate had been exposed — a president spying on his political adversaries without warrants in the name of national security — Congress enacted in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It prescribed a means for surveillance other than that which the Constitution requires.

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