Detroit Free Press: A federal judge torpedoed a state law that enables police to compel pedestrians under the age of 21 to submit to alcohol breath tests without a court order.
The judge, who is to be commended for actually knowing the Constitution, held that the law “is unconstitutional on its face because it is repugnant to the Fourth Amendment.” Note that he used 32 pages of legalese to say so, when a single sentence would have sufficed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with the ruling. The law sucked and deserved to be thrown out. I’m annoyed, though, that some legislator drafted the damned thing in the first place, managed to persuade a majority if his/her colleagues that it was a good law, and got the governor to sign off on it. I’m disappointed that it took 9 years and a federal lawsuit to get rid of such an obviously bogus law. And I’m genuinely pissed that laws like this get passed every single day, at every level of government.
The whole system is so seriously broken that I doubt reform is even an option anymore.
EDIT: I banged out this entry while doing 4 other things simultaneously, so I didn’t really flesh it out as much as I should have.
Admittedly, this is a minor thing for me to get bent out of shape over. After all, the law got struck down; the good guys won.
I’m just continually frustrated by the stream of blatantly unconstitutional laws hitting the books and the difficulty of getting rid of them. Legislatures can pass whatever they want, and they suffer no consequences when their laws are found unconstitutional. To get that court ruling, though, a citizen usually has to break the law in question and put him/herself in jeopardy of very serious consequences. Then there’s a years-long and extremely expensive battle in the courts, often with appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court (which only grants Cert to a small percentage of cases). Plenty of people lose when they can no longer afford to fight.
What to do about it? One idea I like is mandatory sunset provisions in all laws. After 10 years it’s automatically off the books, unless it’s specifically, individually re-enacted (i.e., no omnibus “we hereby renew all laws due to expire this year” bills).
We’d be able to get rid of lots of bad laws that way, and there’s the bonus side-effect of reducing legislatures’ ability to pass NEW garbage by forcing them to spend a lot of time reviewing old laws.
There’s also the idea (I forget where I first saw it) of requiring all bills to cite the section of the Constitution which allows such a law to be enacted.
Of course, the more fundamental solution would be electing legislators who actually respect the Constitution…
