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Indybay Feature

Supreme Courts Affirm The Police State

by Bob Livingston
Supreme Courts Affirm The Police State
May 23, 2011

Our descent into a police state is complete, as evidenced by rulings by the Indiana and U.S. Supreme Courts which, last week, effectively and finally abolished the 4th Amendment.

No longer are American citizens “secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” thanks to the two rulings affirming police authority to bash down your door and enter your home without a warrant. Resisting such an incursion is now a crime. If it weren’t obvious before that we live in a fascist system under guise of Democracy, surely, it must be now.

In Indiana, the Supreme Court ruled 3-2 “that there is no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police officers.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s 8-1 ruling affirmed that officers can kick down a door if they smell marijuana or hear noises indicative of the destruction of evidence. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, writing, “Police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.”) The fact that the door they kicked in was not the door their suspect had entered was irrelevant to the court.

Of course, we told you a couple of weeks ago about the case of Maryanne Godboldo, who had a Detroit Police SWAT team crash into her home and remove her daughter because Godboldo made the perfectly reasonable and rational choice to determine what medication her daughter should take.

And we’ve previously told you about the assault on the 4th Amendment by the Department of Homeland Security through the porn show/gropefest at the airports and, just as egregious, the home peepshow enabling the Z Backscatter Van™ that is now rolling on American streets.

But the court rulings are among the first to affirm the police state. And they open us up to a system where the police have carte blanche to do as they please.

Think this is an overreaction? Tell it to the citizens of Newton County, Ind., whose sheriff, Don Hartman Sr., told the Mike Church radio show on Thursday that random house-to-house searches are now possible because of the Indiana Supreme Court’s ruling.

“(H)e emphatically indicated that he would use random house to house (sic) checks, adding he felt people will welcome random searches if it means capturing a criminal,” according to a posting on Church’s website. By Thursday afternoon there was a Facebook page calling for Hartman’s removal from office.

The Founders are surely weeping for an America they no longer recognize.

Our country became great and prosperous because its citizens were allowed to own property. The Founders subscribed to the theory of John Locke that “if (a person) be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?”

The elites understand this as well. That is why there is an assault on property rights, like in the ruling in Kelo v. The City of New London. It’s why a system based on property taxes is so egregious, because the State forces you to pay for the right to own your own property and can take it away at the force of a gun if, through some financial hardship or error, you don’t pay the tax in a timely manner.

The fascist elites in government are winning. We have become the despotism of an oligarchy, which Thomas Jefferson warned about when he wrote: “It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all Constitutional questions. It is one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

We have told you before of the folly of expecting any of the ruling class to do anything or make any laws or rulings that would deny them more power. The President, members of Congress, the bureaucrats who occupy the offices of government, the justices, judges, lawyers, accountants and officers of the court system are employees of and for government. Their desire is to accumulate more power for government and more power and prestige for themselves. It is a desire that knows no party affiliation.

John Adams wrote: “… because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

That is where we are. We as a nation have rejected God and spat upon his principles. We have put in power people who see themselves as gods — elitists who think they know more than we and who think they know better than we how we should live our lives. We’ve allowed them to dictate what kind of cars we drive, what kind of light bulbs we can use, how much water our toilets flush, what foods we can eat, what doctors we see, what drugs we can — or must — take and what harmful chemicals can be placed in our water. And then we sat back as the oligarchy banned any and every mention of God in schools and public places.

We have rejected the teachings of our fathers. We have turned our backs on liberty and accepted the perceived safety net of tyranny. We slept while the Constitution burned.

The 1 percent in government controls the 99 percent. Of those 99 percent, 49.5 percent are perfectly content to be controlled as long as the “free” money comes their way. The remaining 49.5 percent is divided among those who are so unaware that they are unaware they are unaware, those who are aware but don’t know what to do, and those who know what’s coming and have been preparing.

Those who are aware but don’t know what to do scream at the top of their lungs that things are wrong. They don’t know exactly what things are wrong, or why, just that they are.

They have been blinded by the 1 percent, which controls through gross deception. They are being stolen from and lied to. They are being herded like sheep to the slaughter, and the last vestige of hope in the court system has betrayed them.

Failing regimes respond in their death throes by engaging in perpetual wars, debasing their currency and clamping down on the freedoms of their people. As the power elites try to hold on to their last vestiges of control, they enslave their subjects through the tyranny of a police state.

We live in a country that once threw off the shackles of tyranny. Our Founders chose not to tolerate a police state that allowed armed soldiers of the crown to enter homes at will, ransack, pillage and abuse. They understood such practices violated hundreds of years of law that established that a man’s home was his castle and not subject to invasion by the regime.

Such abuses were so egregious to the Founders that they were among the ones specifically mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.

The system is collapsing. All around the world — from China to Europe to the Middle East — the proletariat is rising up. People are protesting rising food prices and lack of freedom and clamoring for a form of democracy. The regimes respond to the protests with violence, sometimes aided and abetted by the United States and its form of humanitarianism.

In America, the proles still sleep, but they are stirring. Those who are aware are finding their legs and their voices, as evidenced by last November’s elections. Every day, more of the unaware are waking from the fog of conventional wisdom.

If you have not yet begun to prepare for the coming storm, you have waited almost too long. The winds are against you now. Gold tells the story of the rapid descent of the system. It takes almost twice as many fiat dollars to purchase an ounce today as it did just two years ago.

But gold remains a bargain. Silver, too. Store food and water for the hard times, which are nearer than you think. The ride is getting bumpy. It will get worse before it gets better. For most, life will soon be very difficult.
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Comments (Hide Comments)
by Clark Wolf
I respectfully suggest that you read the case before writing about it. It can be found here:

http://www.in.gov/judiciary/opinions/pdf/05121101shd.pdf

The question at issue is not a 4th amendment question at all. The question is whether one has the right to resist an officer of the law who is entering one's home, and whom one believes has no right to enter. The court argues that there is no right to resist an officer in that context.

Note that the court expressly does not expand the circumstances in which officers have the right to enter a person's home, nor do they change the rule that evidence collected during and unlawful entry will be excluded from consideration by the court. Those are Fourth Amendment issues.

So it's worth asking: should the court have ruled that people do have the right physically to resist an officer, when they believe that the officer's entry into their home is unlawful? I find it unsurprising that the court judged that we have no such right. If the entry was unlawful, that is a legal issue that can be pursued separately. Physically resisting an officer is a very serious matter, and it's appropriate to restrict the circumstances where people can resist to those cases where urgent necessities are at stake.

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