The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The FISA bill was just the last handful of dirt on the body. The Bill of Rights has been trampled over in the last 8 years and now we've reached the tipping point. When those in the high echelons of power pardon themselves for violating our civil rights and choose to ignore admitted high crimes and misdemeanors by the chief executive, what does it mean to say we live in a country ruled by laws and not men?
This is the end of a slippery slope. The right to privacy was held hostage to the War on Drugs when the people were forced to submit their bodily fluids for testing in order to support themselves and their families. Asset forfeiture was implemented as an unjust means of funding the assault of our civil liberties. Guilty until proven innocent was the new standard. Those pulled over for speeding, suspected of other minor offenses, or simply passing through state border inspection stations are subjected to the most sensitive of detection mechanisms, drug sniffing canines. All for what purpose? At what cost?
The cost is the largest prison population in the "free" world. The waste of human resources is immense and completely out of proportion to any harm that may have been done. Victimless crimes do not warrant incarceration. The harm is caused by the government trying to protect the people from themselves. The cost we pay as a nation is worse than the cost we pay as individuals. As Rev. M.L. King Jr. so famously said,
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Or, more recently, as Rev. Wright infamously said,
"America’s chickens are coming home to roost."
The "War on Terror" has become a war on our civil liberties, if it was ever really anything else. Does it take a war to bring a group of thugs to justice? In this war, as in any war, the weakest point of defense is the most vulnerable to attack. The Bill of Rights being the prime target, the fourth amendment becomes a primary focus of the assault. If terrorists set out to destroy our way of life, they would have been hard pressed to create more havoc than their enablers in our own government have set in motion subsequent to the despicable acts of 9/11. As Lincoln so eloquently said,
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
The conception, the dedication and the liberties Lincoln was talking about were, and are, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, and more specifically the Bill of Rights. The civil war we are now engaged in is no less about our fundamental principles than it was then. If we are a nation of laws and not men, then no President should have any more power to ignore the law than the least of our citizens. The Constitution was conceived in a time of crisis, the founders intended it to apply equally in extraordinary, just as in the most peaceful of times. No inherent unitary executive powers were ever implied nor circumscribed, and by the weight of all available evidence the intention was quite the opposite.
How long can this nation endure in keeping true to our founding propositions without the Bill of Rights. The FISA act and numerous other well intentioned, and not so well intentioned, laws, executive orders, pseudo-official policies and caveats have reduced the fundamental principles of this country to rubble. It will take more than good intentions to remedy, more than four years of involving people in the process of their own government again to set right. It seems obvious that the Constitution needs a reaffirmation. The founders of this country foresaw this possibility and postulated a solution in the form of a constitutional convention. We the people need to set this right.