Actually, he trashed it. Did it escape your notice? Here are a couple of his amendments, secret until now, which didn’t even have to pass muster with that nasty liberal Supreme Court! (At least Earl Warren had to find four other justices to go along with him).
“Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure, for instance, did not apply in the United States as long as the president was combating terrorism, the Justice Department said in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo. [Note: VP Cheney said the War On Terrorism would go on for fifty years, so we can assume that the original Fourth Amendment will come back into force in 2059].
“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote, adding later: “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.” [Note: Bush went to the U.N. for the authorization to go to war, instead of the Congress, as the original Constitution requires — but who cares?].
The only way to solve this problem is to pass the entire original Bill Of Rights again — all Ten Amendments — amending every subsequent amendment, court case, and government malfeasance — so that the Bill Of Rights will once more be the law of the land, unsullied by two centuries of abuse by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.
8:49 pm on March 2, 2009
