Stupidity and Authority

It is the kind of thing which makes us think that maybe the civil libertarians have a point after all. The City of Detroit Police Department, in the settlement of not one but two lawsuits, has agreed to respect the First Amendment rights of citizens and visitors to the city by not writing tickets tickets for behaviors which are not in fact illegal. You see, the DPD has been found to write tickets where no offense was committed. One case in particular involved ticketing a man for loitering in a known drug trafficking area. Yet he was legally parked at the time (he was in his car) and no such statute was ion the books.

The rank stupidity of such actions confounds reason. As that actions itself took place in November 2008, it further boggles the mind that it would take more than three years for a resolution to the issue. How could any lawyer reasonably represent the DPD under such circumstances? How could they not expect the ACLU (the driving force behind the legal action) to make hay of it?

Detroit police officers must now be reminded that those who merely verbally oppose, criticize and question them cannot be threatened with arrest. We admit having our qualms about the whole question authority idea as a philosophic point. It's one thing to question authority if you honestly seek knowledge, which of course you have the right to do in potential arrest or ticketing situation. Yet it is quite another to question valid authority simply to incite, or to question it's very validity when it is in fact valid.

But, admittedly, that is a sidebar issue here. How this case even became a case is the real question. What kind of police do we have in Detroit when at least some of them feel compelled to issue tickets for nonexistent infractions? It seems there are things at work beyond simple Constitutional matters. There should be no officers on the street who do not know what is and is not a ticketable or arrestable offense. This requires more than reminding the men and women in blue to respect the Constitution. It seems to call for structural changes within the selection of training, and retention of officers.

The incidents, to be fair, are likely isolated. But that makes then no less an affront to the rights of the people, especially, of course, the people directly involved. It even offends perhaps more the good officers who we are sure form the vast, majority of the ranks. Yet we must suppose that they respect the action taken, or they would not be the good guys themselves. We are all the better for that.

The ACLU hates democracy

An Arizona federal appeals court, and that point must be emphasized, has ruled against an Arizona law which required that voters prove their citizenship and to show identification when attempting to vote. The state law is inconsistent with national law, specifically the National Voter Registration Act. The ACLU claimed that the Arizona law, passed by popular vote in 2004, kept the poor 'who could not afford a driver's license or birth certificate' to go ahead and vote.

Never mind that such ideas are wide open to voter fraud, something that the ACLU and their liberal Democratic allies surely don't mind. The voters they claim to be protecting are most likely of their ilk. Did it ever occur to them that just maybe the rights of those same poor at at stake, too? Their own votes may one day be watered down should more folks without proof of who they are be conservative.

The easy answer to that one complaint would be to encourage the states to give free IDs or birth certificates to anyone who could show duress, but that won't do for the leftists. Doing things by the rule book the rest of us are expected to follow, i.e., the legislative process, takes so long. Let's just go to the courts when we don't like what the people have wrought.

We are becoming a nation of men, not laws, when the ACLU and their brethren can smack down the will of the people in court rather than through the action of actual legislators actually elected to create good law, or through public initiative ballots. We shall, if we continue to let courts make law as the ACLU wants, find ourselves eventually with an oligarchy, not a republic. It will be an oligarchy of judges who will not have to answer to the people.

But the ACLU doesn't mind that. When rights are at stake, specifically the rights they like, nothing else matters. If there is ever an American Hitler, he will arise from the ranks of the American Civil Liberties Union.

No court will then stop him.