When I peruse the Constitution of the United States my overwhelming take is those who wrote it had a distrust of authority. They did not trust political bodies to work for the people, they were certain law enforcement and the military were tools of oppressive governments.
This is a sentiment apparently completely forgotten by the people of this country and more importantly, abandoned by our legal system. It’s my opinion this country is headed in a terrible and dangerous direction.
The Supreme Court has no Distrust of Authority
In what I consider to be one of the most telling rulings of our plight, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.
The opinion centered around whether or not law enforcement can stop and demand identification from someone who happens to be a laborer in Los Angeles and appears to be Latino.
The six justices making this ruling clearly trust authority. They suppose when given the right to detain people for being in a certain place at a certain time with a certain skin tone, the police will do the right thing when presented with evidence. These six justices are clearly at odds with the Founding Fathers.
Distrust Authority
The Constitution is largely a document that spells out exactly what authorities can do and attempts to establish limits on that authority. The government and its law enforcement arm cannot take your guns because they don’t like them. They cannot take your property because they want it. They cannot search you without probable cause. They cannot prevent you from gathering to protest. They cannot do many, many things. These safeguards weren’t written by a group of people who expected law enforcement to do the right thing, unlike Justice Kavanaugh and his self-delusional cohorts.
The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in response to the overbearing authority of England. A government that could take your home to house troops. An authority that could stop you because you were in a certain place, at a certain time, with a certain look, for no reason at all. That could detain you indefinitely even if you showed you were completely innocent.
A king and parliament that could pass any law, at any time, for any reason. They did not trust authority to do the right thing. The knew full and well authority tends to do the opposite of the right thing. They tend to harass and brutalize those they don’t like for whatever reason is the flavor of the moment.
We must Regain our Distrust of Authority
This delusion that authority is on our side, that we must trust authority to save us from the lawless permeates our society. Perhaps we’ve had it too good, perhaps we’ve become trembling babies who need daddy authority to make us feel all safe.
The more power we invest in government, the less safe we become. The Founding Fathers understood but we seem to have forgotten.
Tom Liberman