Jew World Order

Boston and Freedom

by
Andrew P. Napolitano

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The government’s
fidelity to the Constitution is never more tested than in a time
of crisis. The urge to do something – or to appear to be doing something
– is nearly irresistible to those whom we have employed to protect
our freedom and to keep us safe. Regrettably, with each passing
violent crisis – Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11, Newtown and
now the Boston Marathon – our personal freedoms continue to slip
away, and the government itself remains the chief engine of that
slippage.

The American
people made a pact with the devil in the weeks and months following
9/11 when they bought the Bush-era argument that by surrendering
liberty they could buy safety. But that type of pact has never enhanced
either liberty or safety, and its fruits are always bitter.

The Constitution
is the supreme law of the land. It was written to create and to
restrain the federal government. Every person who works for any
government in the U.S. has taken an oath of fidelity to the Constitution,
not unlike the presidential oath, which induces a promise to preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution.

The chief and
final interpreter of the Constitution is the Supreme Court. One
may not always agree with its interpretations, but they are, as
legal scholars sometimes say, “infallible because they are final.”
Those interpretations are particularly final when we have relied
on them for generations.

One of those
rulings underscores the primacy of constitutional protections, no
matter the environment in which they are claimed. Indeed, after
the Civil War had ended and President Lincoln was dead, the Supreme
Court in a case called Ex parte Milligan (1866) rebuked and reversed
Lincoln’s unilateral assaults on personal freedoms in the North
and in so doing reminded us that the Constitution was written for
good times and for bad, and its protections cover all persons at
all times and under all circumstances who have any contact, voluntary
or not, with the government.

The court has
also ruled consistently throughout the 20th century that just as
the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, it also protects
the freedom not to engage in speech. One hundred years after Milligan,
the Supreme Court first recognized and articulated the constitutional
basis for the right to remain silent in the Miranda case. That right
is a natural right that is inherent in all human beings, and it
is arguably articulated in the First and Fifth Amendments.

But since the
court understood that most folks don’t know that they have the right
to remain silent in the face of government demands for speech, it
mandated that all governments – local, state and federal – comply
with their affirmative obligation to tell everyone in their custody
whom their agents wish to interrogate about the existence of this
right, as well as the obligation of the government to honor it faithfully
once it has been invoked. That has consistently been the law of
the land for the past 50 years.

The pact with
the devil occurred in the fall of 2001, when then President George
W. Bush and Congress decided that they would use the machinery of
the federal government to secure safety, rather than liberty. So,
the Bush-inspired Patriot Act permits federal agents to write their
own search warrants, and the Bush-inspired new FISA statutes permit
search warrants of some Americans’ phone calls without a showing
of probable cause as the Constitution requires, and the Bush-era
intimidation of telephone service providers permitted our overseas
spies to snoop on our domestic phone calls. None of this has enhanced
safety, and all of it has diminished liberty.

In the Obama
administration, the devil has demanded more. In the past five years,
we have seen federal spies capturing the keystrokes on our computers,
local police using federal dollars to install cameras and microphones
on nearly every street corner, and, the latest lamentable phenomenon,
the use of false emergencies to undermine freedom.

This began
at the Mexican border, where immigration agents have been told to
interrogate first and Mirandize later. It moved to Washington, where
we have an attorney general who has told federal agents that the
extremely limited public safety exception to the Miranda rule can
exist for up to 48 hours. And it proceeded to the spectacle of well-meaning
FBI agents being told to reject their training and the common understanding
of well-regarded constitutional law and interrogate a half-drugged
suspect with a hole in his throat whom they were about to charge
with mass murder, in utter defiance of Miranda.

The public
safety exception to Miranda goes to the safety of the officers and
others present at the moment of arrest. It permits the police to
express an excited utterance (“Where’s the gun?”) in an effort to
protect themselves before securing the defendant and before advising
him of his rights. According to the Supreme Court, it can last for
just a few seconds.

The Obama administration’s
radical reinterpretation of the natural and constitutional right
to remain silent is unprecedented, terrifying and disingenuous.
Think about this: The governor of Massachusetts, the superintendent
of the Massachusetts State Police, the mayor of Boston, the Boston
police commissioner, and the head of the Boston FBI office all proclaimed
on Saturday morning that the danger had passed and Boston and its
suburbs could return to normal. Yet the attorney general in Washington
told his FBI agents in Boston to disregard those officials and instead
pretend that the public safety was still jeopardized and then expand
a 10-second window to 72 hours.

The Constitution
was written to preserve freedom by restraining the government. The
courts from time to time have required the government to respect
the natural law, as well. But when the attorney general arbitrarily
changes the law to suit the demands of the people when they are
weeping, it fundamentally undermines our freedoms. And a pact with
the devil is the most dangerous of all, because his appetite can
never be sated.

Reprinted
with the author’s permission.

April 25, 2013

Andrew P.
Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey,
is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano
has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent
is Theodore
and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional
Freedom. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read
features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit
creators.com.

Copyright
© 2013 Andrew P. Napolitano

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