Publicani

Judge Napolitano speaks about one of the many anti-constitutional laws from Patriot act:

“No longer can you be completely open with your significant other…”

“If the FBI shows up at your doorstep tomorrow with a self-written search warrant to seize personal items from your home, legally you are not authorized to tell anyone of that warrant.”

This is what Napolitano says about Patriot Act:

 The Patriot Act’s two most principle constitutional errors are an assault on the Fourth Amendment, and on the First. It permits federal agents to write their own search warrants [under the name "national security letters"] with no judge having examined evidence …

Not only that, but the Patriot Act makes it a felony for the recipient of a self-written search warrant to reveal it to anyone.

Most of the current candidates for the U.S. Presidency supported Patriot Act. With the exception of Dr. No of course. What does Napolitano think of Ron Paul?

Now Reagan tried, before [James] Baker and his boys advised him on how to behave. Now, I loved the man, but if you look at his record and rhetoric, they are two different things. But Ron Paul had made it legitimate again for small government, maximum individual liberty…

So many of my Fox colleagues, whom I love working with, have such trust and faith in the heart and head of President Bush. But look at the calendar: He’ll be Mr.Bush in 14 months, and unless it’s Ron Paul, God knows what his successor will do with the powers Congress had purported to give him. And I say “purported” because they don’t have the right to actually do all the extraconstitutional things they’ve done.

So what is the right balance between  our liberties and security? Napolitano:

Now, for the most part the president and his colleagues in both parties have succeeded in scaring the daylights out of people. Government grows in wartime because people are afraid, and they accept the satanic bargain that government offers: Give us your liberty and we will keep you safe. Many people think that when government is suppressing speech or privacy or fair prosecutions, that since those usurpations are so drastic that they must be keeping us safer.

But when the president says that his first job is to keep us safe, He is dead wrong. Read the oath of office: His first job is not to keep us safe, but to keep us free [by upholding the Constitution]. When you have this value judgment between freedom and safety, I’d rather have freedom with danger than slavery with safety.

But the supposed tradeoff when it comes to civil liberties isn’t really there. Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School spent five years reading every judicial opinion in the history of the United States on freedom of speech. Of all the cases of people prosecuted and convicted of violating some law that regulated speech, his conclusion is there is not one, not one single instance in all American history, where America’s security was adversely affected because of too much free speech. When government says it is keeping you safer by criminalizing speech, it’s a canard. They are making their own job easier by criminalizing speech because they have less dissent to confront.