A Stitch in Haste

Regarding New York City's constitutionally suspect random search requirement for entrance to the subway system, I previosuly blogged the following:

I think what is going on is that the police talked themselves into a corner. They were so concerned about charges of "racial profiling" (which some bloggers think wouldn't be such a bad idea anyway) that they rushed to declare the program "random" -- which is exactly what may get them into trouble constitutionally...

Well, the descent down the slippery slope of unconstitutionality progresses on schedule:

Middle Easterners should be targeted for searches on city subways, two elected officials said, contending that police have been wasting time with random checks in efforts to prevent terrorism in the transit system.
...
[S]tate Assemblyman Dov Hikind said police should be focusing on those who fit the "terrorist profile."

"They all look a certain way," said Hikind, a Democrat from Brooklyn. "It's all very nice to be politically correct here, but we're talking about terrorism."

On Tuesday, Republican City Councilman James Oddo said the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack by Middle Eastern men in hijacked airplanes prompted him to publicly declare his support for Hikind's statements.

"The reality is that there is a group of people who want to kill us and destroy our way of life," he said. "Young Arab fundamentalists are the individuals undertaking these acts of terror, and we should keep those facts prominently in our minds and eyes as we attempt to secure our populace."

So we started with a Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that was quite clear-cut: no searches of property without individualized suspicion. Then, in the name of the War or Terror, the government said that protecting the subways was more important than protecting individual rights and the individualized suspicion requirement was abandoned in the name of "safety."

Now come politicians who, observing the correct but irrelevant fact that the current search protocols are a joke, choose not to advocate scrapping the program outright, but rather propose "tweaking it" into a race-based search program, and in the process riding roughshod over even more constitutional protections.

All in the name of "preserving and defending our way of life."

Go figure.

Wouldn't it just be easier to return to our roots, treat the plain text of the Fourth Amendment as if it meant something and simply have searches based on probable cause?

Of course it would be easier. But it wouldn't satisfy the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling. After all, it is better to feel safe than to be safe. And it is much easier to feel safe than to respect the Constitution.

Because, again, we have to "preserve and defend our way of life."

Whatever that means anymore.