Constitution
Constitution Day: 225 Years in Passage of Time; Light Years in Loss of Liberty
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
Every day our Republic moves more distant in many ways from that day 225 years ago when 39 of the original 55 delegates signed the Constitution they had begun crafting nearly four months earlier.
No matter how ardent a nationalist, there wasn’t a single representative present at that convention who could have either imagined or approved of a federal government of the size and scope of the present one.
With the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, small businessman Matt Sissel argues that the majority opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts kills the Affordable Care Act because it did not originate in the House of Representatives.
On September 12 a federal district court judge made permanent on earlier order temporarily blocking enforcement of provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) purporting to empower the president to deploy the U.S. military to apprehend and indefinitely detain people suspected of "substantially supporting" al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or "associated forces."
In announcing the global war on terrorism in his speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush put the world on notice: "Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." After Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft was dismissive, even contemptuous, of concerns being raised over civil liberties violations, describing those complaints as "fear mongering." To "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty," Ashcroft delivered the following message:
Your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.
Since 9-11, those "phantoms of lost liberty" have been writing our nation's laws.
In a document filed September 4 in the D.C. District Court, the Obama administration argues that there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in a person’s cellphone GPS data. The president’s lawyers insist they do not need a warrant to request cellphone company records regarding a customer’s movements and location as tracked by their signal towers.
In its argument against a motion filed to suppress the government’s use of a defendant’s cellphone location data, the administration claims the customer tracking records kept by cellphone service providers are no different from other business-related “third-party records” such as store receipts, and customers have no legal basis for any additional expectation of privacy.
The feds are making their case for warrantless tracking of citizens in a re-trial of an accused drug dealer whose conviction was thrown out by the Supreme Court in its decision in the case of United States v. Jones.
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