The Fourth Amendment is the most important amendment in the Bill of Rights. All the rest don’t mean a thing if the police can stop you, search you, and seize you at will. And trust me, they can. Courts have spent the last century or so inventing enough exceptions to your right to remain free from unreasonable search and seizure that the Fourth Amendment isn’t worth the paper all those warrants aren’t written on. On the other hand, the idea that you might have to show your license before you buy a rocket launcher at Wal-Mart incenses a large group…

Judge Shelley Joseph is the poster-victim for an out of control government. In case you don’t know who she is, the Massachusetts state court judge was indicted by the feds for not playing ball with ICE agents that wanted to pull an allegedly illegal immigrant out of her courtroom.  But this isn’t a post about illegal immigration. It’s a post about what the government thinks about the citizens it accuses of crimes.  Jessica Vaughn is the Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. While CIS claims to be an independent, non-partisan research center, their website quickly reveals the group is…

There were a few golden seconds where it appeared regular people and high and mighty legislators were actually on the same page. As local, state, and federal governments got criticized for the legal theft they describe as “civil asset forfeiture” a strange thing happened.  Regular people actually cared about something more complicated than 140 280 characters and our legislators quit fundraising and pandering and started to address a real issue.  Or so it appeared.  All the soundbites about limiting the government’s unchecked forfeiture power turned out to be just that – soundbites. Terry Rolin is finding that out the hard…