Eulogy For The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment was conceived in 1789 as a series of constitutional amendments, and was born on December 15, 1791. Proud father James Madison said it was one of his favorites, although the First and Second Amendment generally got more attention.

The Fourth Amendment started growing in importance and prominence, however, when the Supreme Court adopted the exclusionary rule in Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), prior to which all evidence, no matter how seized, could be admitted in court. A few decades later, the Fourteenth Amendment helped bolster the importance of the Fourth Amendment with Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961) where the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment is applicable to the state governments by way of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the early part of the 21st century, the Fourth Amendment grew concerned, after its brother, the Eighth Amendment, was exiled by the Bush Adminstration. Not long after, the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments were tied up, gagged, and locked in Dick Cheney’s basement.

In 2003, an official memo in the Bush administration stated “… our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations”. Given that the NSA was involved in domestic military operations, this was, in essence, a death threat against the Fourth Amendment.

A few years later, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, signed by President Bush today, not only legalized the secret warrantless surveillance program the president approved in late 2001, it also gave the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.

Since then, the Fourth Amendment has gone missing and has been declared dead by White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. The ACLU has argued that the Fourth Amendment is not in fact dead, and it’s just scared and has gone into hiding.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit today to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the new wiretapping law, arguing that gives the Bush administration virtually unchecked power to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls. The case was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work - which relies on confidential communications - will be greatly compromised by the new law.

In the meantime, several other Amendments, including the First, Seventh, and Fourteenth, have hired bodyguards and 24-hour security forces, and the Twenty-Second has said he is considering cancelling his quadrennial appearance this coming November.