Who Will Keep Our Freedoms Safe? – Judge Andrew Napolitano – Page full

None of these flagrant violations of privacy, dignity and basic American constitutional values was enacted by a majority vote of any representative body of lawmakers — and yet none has been stopped by those lawmakers. That’s because we have a deep state system in American government, whereby certain law enforcement, military, intelligence and diplomatic personnel can do as they wish, no matter which party controls the legislative and executive branches and in hair-splitting defiance of the courts.

That hair-splitting defiance argues that the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy in the “persons, houses, papers and effects” of all in America only pertains to criminal prosecutions; thus, the government, this argument goes, can invade all the privacy it wants so long as it is for some other — non-criminal — purpose. Supreme Court decisions recognizing privacy as a personal natural right, as well as American constitutional history (the Fourth Amendment was written largely in reaction to British soldiers invading privacy by looking for items in the colonists’ homes to tax), profoundly reject that argument.

How does the government get away with this? If you peered into your neighbor’s bedroom with a high-tech device, you’d be prosecuted or sued. Yet when the government does this, most folks are supine enough to be grateful for the safety it produces. That’s what Big Brother wants you to believe. What safety? Who will keep us safe from the government? Who will keep our personal liberties safe? What representative government splits hairs in order to defy the Constitution, rather than complying with its oath to protect it?

via Who Will Keep Our Freedoms Safe? – Judge Andrew Napolitano – Page full.