The Fourth Amendment? Hmmmm. No, we’ve never heard of that one

By David McElroy · August 14, 2013

After a federal judge ordered the New York City Police Department to stop violating the rights of innocent people, all NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg could do was whine about the potential dangers of respecting the rights of the innocent.

For more than a decade, New York City police have randomly stopped pedestrians and questioned them, then frisked them for weapons. Bloomberg defends the program as saving lives, but he doesn’t understand that we have constitutional rights that protect us against unreasonable searches. He doesn’t get to decide when to ignore our rights.

Since 2004, NYC police have made 4.4 million stops and frisked 2.3 million people. Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin noted in her ruling that no weapons were found in 98.5 percent of the frisks. That means that nearly all of those 2.3 million people searched for weapons were innocent — and the searches took place without cause and without any guilt on their part.

Under the NYC program, there didn’t have to be any reason to suspect anyone. Police were encouraged to search more and more people — and the real-world results have been that the vast majority of those searched have been young black and Hispanic men. The judge called it a form of racial profiling.

Unfortunately, the judge didn’t order a stop to searching people without cause, because there’s Supreme Court precedent for allowing that. Yes, the justices of the highest court can’t read the text of the Constitution and see that we’re entitled to be free from such searches if we’re not under reasonable suspicion. Here’s what the text of the Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I’m opposed to racial profiling, but I’m just as opposed to unreasonable searches of any person, regardless of race or religion or sex or home planet. We have the right — which the U.S. government acknowledges in the Constitution — to be left alone unless there’s a reasonable suspicion that we’ve done something wrong.

This is another case in which lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats have found ways to explain away the intent of text in the Constitution. Is it any wonder that some of us consider it a dead document? Government pays lip service to it, but then finds any excuses it wants to ignore the intent of the words.

Bloomberg is furious because he alleged that some criminals are caught this way. By his logic, we should allow police to conduct warrantless house-to-house searches for illegal weapons and fugitives. (Hey, they got away with it in Boston recently and few people seemed to object.) There’s no doubt that they’d find some illegal things in those draconian searches, so we can assume that a few crimes might be stopped. But we don’t allow that because none of us want police entering our homes without reason and without warrants to root around looking for wrongdoing.

So why have we put up with it when it comes to NYC’s program? I think it’s simply that it’s been poor blacks and Hispanics who have been targeted. If people who look like me were being targeted, we would fight back in court and in the media. The innocent black and Hispanic victims of this program haven’t had the standing to do that, because a lot of people are willing to assume they’re guilty of something. So people with power in society haven’t had a problem with it, for the most part.

If higher courts uphold the ban on the program, it’s a great step in the right direction. But a better outcome would be ending such searches entirely. They’re wrong and they should be legally banned.

We have the right to be left alone as long as we’re not doing anything criminal. The people who adopted the Bill of Rights specifically put that in there to make sure the right was acknowledged. It’s time that many government employees — from police departments to intelligence agencies — took that right seriously.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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