|
Townhall
Obama
Likes Secrets, Including Yours
Steve
Chapman
Jun
29, 2014
The
surprising thing about the Supreme Court's decision on police
searches of cellphones was its unanimity. Aligned on the same side of
a major law enforcement issue were liberal and conservative justices
who normally fight like cats and dogs. All agreed that it's
intolerable to let cops ransack the voluminous contents of mobile
phones.
Who
could disagree? Well, cops, of course. And the Obama administration.
Barack
Obama led Americans to believe that he would be far more sensitive to
privacy and civil liberties than George W. Bush. But more often than
not, he reflexively indulges the demands of law enforcement agencies
-- and, for that matter, all agencies. In clashes between government
and the individual, the president almost invariably sides with the
former.
In
this case, the Justice Department took the view that a cellphone is
just another object a person may carry, no different from a roll of
mints. It was a view that drew scorn from Chief Justice John Roberts,
who wrote, "That is like saying a ride on horseback is
materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon."
The
government's resounding defeat brings to mind one Roberts experience
when he was still arguing before the court as a lawyer. After losing
a case, his client asked why the vote was 9-0. "Well,"
answered Roberts, "because there are only nine justices."
The
rebuke ought to give the Justice Department pause. "When you
can't get Samuel Alito to vote with you on a police case, you've lost
all sense of proportion," George Washington University law
professor Jonathan Turley told me.
It
may be standard procedure for the department to side with cops when
their practices are challenged. But it's not always wise -- and
besides, when did candidate Obama ever promise to dutifully uphold
the status quo, right or wrong?
The
administration took a similarly cramped attitude in another case
where the cops wanted free rein to investigate your habits. It argued
that police should be free to attach GPS monitoring devices to cars
without a warrant, because that doesn't constitute a search...
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
|
