WILL THE GHOST OF ANTONIN SCALIA DOOM THE NYPD'S REVIVED SUBWAY SEARCH PROGRAM?
GOV. KATHY HOCHUL AND MAYOR ERIC ADAMS ANNOUNCE SUBWAY RIDERS WILL BE RANDOMLY SEARCHED UNDER ALLEGED ANTI-TERROR MEASURE.
COMMINUQE #4
What’s in your bag? The NYPD wants to see exactly what before you get on the subway. Here’s one outlaw woman’s answer in 2015.
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In the wake of 9/11, the word "terrorism" was enough to scare Americans into surrendering precious, hard-fought freedoms earlier generations of patriots paid for in blood.
One of these liberties is the Fourth Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons" and "effects." These rights, the Constitution says, "shall not be violated." But when Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the NYPD started forcing would-be subway riders to submit to searches of their bags in 2005, a panel of three federal appeals court judges rubber-stamped their approval.
By 2010 or so, the NYPD more-or-less stopped. It just wasn't an effective crime-fighting tool. It was Kabuki crime-fighting theater. The man-hours were better spent doing something else. Maybe real police work.
Now two Democrats are bringing the post-9/11 subway bag searches back. With Zionist Israeli openly committing genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams' jointly decided the time was right to remind New Yorkers their only rights are those graciously afforded them by their rulers—on condition of good behavior.
The tyrants in George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, would be proud.
It's not enough that government agents of all kind routinely snoop through our emails and bank accounts, photograph our mail, track our movements in vehicles, photograph us walking down the street, stop-and-frisk us, compel us to disclose personal information as a condition of Government licensing, among many other personal intrusions.
Now Big Brother demands we surrender one of our last bits of personal privacy as a condition of using public transportation. This in a city where riding the subway is a birthright. Where owning a car and driving are beyond the financial means of many if not most of the City’s mostly working-class residents.
I don't know about you, but what's in my motherfucking bag is my motherfucking business and no one else's. Especially the motherfucking police! As long as I'm not committing crimes, the Constitution grants me and every citizen the right "to be let alone."
For women, the searches are even more of an affront considering what most women carry in their handbags.
Given the menacing situations they routinely encounter on the streets and subways, many working class women have taken to carrying small self-defense weapons in their handbags. Chiefly Pepperspray but also Tasers, razors and knives. Under the expansive prosecution policies of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the City’s other allegedly “Progressive” prosecutors, these women are criminals if caught by police these weapons.
In our fight to bring the Fourth Amendment back from the dead, New Yorkers have a powerful if pleasantly surprising ally: a Supreme Court justice who actually rode the subway everyday for years. The Queens-bred Antonin Scalia—an under-appreciated defender of the Fourth Amendment.
"I frankly doubt, moreover, whether the fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment would have allowed themselves to be subjected, on mere suspicion of being armed and dangerous, to such indignity," Justice Scalia wrote in a 1993 Supreme Court decision.
While Justice Scalia recognized the Constitution bans warrantless, suspicionless searches his allegedly "Liberal" colleagues adopted a "flexible" approach to the Fourth Amendment. These judges say they “balance” the rights it protects against public safety. But in these judges’ equation, public safety almost always comes before freedom. Whether the excuse is terrorism or crime, the result is the same: police have more power over people.
Power the Fourth Amendment was designed to permanently deprive them of.
Federal judges swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution—not Government restrictions on it. The Constitution draws the correct balance between public safety and the People’s liberty. That Constitution, our Constitution, puts freedom first, not second. Its not judges’ job to adjust the balance. Its their job to enforce the plain meaning of the Constitution. Full stop. Even if they personally disagree with it or the result is “incorrect” according to the politics de jure. Especially then.
True liberty necessarily comes with real risk. If Americans today feel "unsafe" with the Constitution's inherent bias in favor of personal liberty from Government interference, then they should vote to amend the Fourth Amendment. Judges have no legitimate, Constitutional power to effectively amend the Constitution by judicial opinion—not when its plain words clearly command otherwise.
Justice Scalia died in 2016, but the new super-majority of so-called "Conservative" Supreme Court justices say they follow the Originalist trail he blazed. Now is their chance to prove it by resuscitating the Fourth Amendment and giving real meaning to its plain words. That Americans have the right to "be secure in their persons" and "effects” which "shall not be violated."
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