 [7] ALT.POLITICS.LIBERTARIAN (1:375/48)  ALT.POLITICS.LIBERTARIAN 
 Msg  : #5529 [179]                                                             
 From : an25970                             1:2613/335      Fri 29 Apr 94 23:20 
 To   : All                                                                     
 Subj : Clinton's War on Freedom                                                

From: an25970@anon.penet.fi
Organization: Anonymous contact service

[reprinted without permission]

San Antonio Express-News
Saturday, 23 April 1994
page 10D (Commentary)

Slick Willie's Constitution

Marianne Means

     As part of an all-out effort to look tough on crime, President
Clinton is proposing some convoluted legal gyrations to circumvent our
fundamental constitutional protection against random police searches of
private residences without a warrant.

    It may be good politics.  The last thing a Democratic president
wants in this era of violence and fear is to be charged with being a
softie.  But as law it stinks, and it is dangerous to boot.

     This is the kind of too-clever-by-half tricky maneuver that earned
the president the nickname Slick Willie.  He endorsed an indirect and
dubious method of reaching a popular political goal that the courts
will not let him reach by a more direct route.

     He treats the Constitution as an inconvenience, although surely he
cannot have forgotten all those fundamental legal principles he used to
teach as a professor at the University of Arkansas law school.

     The president is willing to make low-income public housing
residents second-class citizens in the name of stamping out crime.  He
would have them waive their rights to allow the police to rummage
through their private possessions at will in entire buildings without
demonstrating probable cause.

     This is a policy that ignores the Founding Fathers' concern that
abusive, unchecked police power can pose a major threat to democracy.

     And if you think the police don't need such limitations, check out
the current corruption shakeup in New York City, where 14 police
officers are charged with selling drugs, protecting dealers and
intimidating their victims.

     If the Clinton waive-your-rights policy can be forced on
low-income folks, it can ultimately be stretched to the rest of us.
The Constitution does not have one set of rights for the well-off and
another, inferior set for the poor.

     His policy is predicated on the false notion that undercutting the
Constitution is the only way to fight crime.  Yet there are other ways,
and some may even be a lot more effective.

     Even the president himself proposes some of the alternatives, such
as more police patrolling common areas in public housing projects and
quicker police response to specific illegal incidents.

     A week ago, Clinton disagreed in his radio address with a Chicago
judge who forbade police to sweep into the low-income, crime-riddled
Robert Taylor Homes withoiut warrants and search the buildings,
apartment by apartment, for weapons and drugs.  The judge refused to
suspend the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibiting
unreasonable searches and siezures, calling such sweeps "a greater evil
than the danger of criminal activity. "

     Clinton ordered the Justice Department to figure out a way around
this constitutional awkwardness.  Within a week, his minions had
complied, issuing a new public housing policy that encourages tenant
leases to include clauses which require consent in advance to
unannounced police intrusions.

     The immediate target is Chicago, but it would apply to all public
housing projects across the country.

     This was justified as no different, really, from typical renter
lease clauses that allow owners' agents to enter private residences in
an emergency, such as a plumbing problem.  Horsefeathers.

     Maintenance inspections legitimately occor only on some
identifiable schedule or when there is probable cause to believe a
specific crisis exists at a specific location, such as water dripping
from a neighbor's ceiling or smoke belching from a window.  These
inspectors do not paw through people's personal possessions, nor do
they show up at will because of events elsewhere in the neighborhood.

     Nor, according to White House briefers, is this waiver of rights
supposed to amount to coercion, definately a constitutional no-no.  It
would be entirely voluntary.

     Sure.

     Prospective tenants, poor families who badly need scarce
affordable shelter, could refuse to sign the pertinent clause, and they
could also be denied an apartment if they do so.

     The White House further encouraged tenant associations to vote en
masse to approve such lease clauses in order to demonstrate their
voluntary nature.  Yet nowhere does the Constitution suggest that a
majority can take away the rights of neighbors in the minority who may
not want to lose those rights.  It very firmly spells out the opposite.

     Clinton seems untroubled by these constitutional niceties and may
in fact not care very much whether he can impose his will or not.  It
is the politics of the matter that he cares about.

     He has positioned himself in opposition to the American Civil
Liberties Union, the chief legal vehicle through which challenges to
the policy would come to the courts.  For a Democrat dedicated to
maintaining a moderate image, this is a good political place to be.

     No Democrat with political ambition has forgotton how George Bush
destroyed his 1988 presidential rival, Democrat Michael Dukakis, by
dubbing him a "card-carrying member of the ACLU," which certified
Dukakis as a liberal, a word Bush regularly pronounced with scorn.

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