Sneak Attack on the Fourth Amendment Revealed
NewsMax.com
Wednesday, May 31, 2000
With the help of top GOP members of Congress, a Justice Department bill already passed by the Senate and being pushed in the House would nullify parts of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
Wrote Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute: "The Reno Department of Justice is very good at being sneaky. The DOJ's lobbyists are on the verge of successfully sneaking into law a provision which will authorize federal agents to stealthily enter people's homes, search the homes, and not tell anyone."
The bill, The Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, allegedly a measure designed to help government and police limit the manufacture and sale of methamphetamines would, for all intents and purposes, make an end run around the ban on unreasonable search and seizure provided by the Constitution.
It glided through the Senate under the guidance of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. The Senate's version of the bill (S. 486) was sponsored by Senator John Ashcroft, R-Mo. The House Bill (H.R. 2987) was sponsored by U.S. Representative Chris Cannon, R-Utah.
Opponents say the bill essentially eradicates the Fourth Amendment, which states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The bill empowers the federal government, state governments and local law enforcement agencies to enter private property, homes, businesses, automobiles, etc. for any "criminal searches" without a warrant and without any legal obligation to inform the private property owner that a search and seizure was conducted until months later, if at all.
According to the Asheville Tribune, the bill also takes a vicious swipe at the First Amendment by allowing government agents "to confiscate intangible? evidence, hard-drive data, photographs or copies made of any documents or family or personal belongings, diaries, etc. without ever having to inform the owner that their property was searched. If physical evidence was taken, then the government could wait up to 90 days later, before having to notify the owner that a secret search of their property ever occurred."
In an article published May 18 in National Review Online, Kopel said the bill was aimed especially at computer hard drives, which could be copied in an owner?s absence and examined without the owner's knowledge.
Incredibly, the bill has echoes of the Waco tragedy, another Reno disaster. Agents of the thuggish BATF obtained a search warrant allowing them to launch their raid on the Branch Davidian compound by falsely claiming that cult leader David Koresh was manufacturing methamphetamines at the compound. Under the new bill, they would not have had to bother getting a warrant, but could simply have gone ahead and staged their attack without worrying about the bothersome Fourth Amendment.
According to the Tribune, a source within the Senate Judiciary committee admitted that the language in the search and seizure provision "slipped by everybody" in the Senate. "[Hatch and the Justice Department] buried it deep in the bill, and nobody noticed until the thing had already passed."
Opponents say the real purpose of the bill is not to restrict the manufacture and sale of methamphetamines but instead to get rid of a constitutional provision the Clinton administration sees as an inconvenience.
Said Kopel: "The Secret Searches measure is so outrageous that it would have no chance of being enacted as a bill on its own, when subjected to public scrutiny and debate. So instead, the DOJ has nestled the Secret Search item deep inside a long bill dealing with methamphetamines."
A spokeswoman for Hatch insisted that meth is the real target of the bill.
Jeanne Lapatto, spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Sen. Hatch, said she was unaware of the specific provisions in question but defended the goals of the bill. "This is a bipartisan bill," Lapatto said. "During hearings, no one had any problems with the overall goal of the bill, which is curbing the horrible problem of methamphetamines."
Not so, says Kopel. "If the Secret Searches provision became law, it would apply to all searches conducted by the federal government, not just searches involving methamphetimines or bankruptcy.
Now aware of the sneak attack provisions in the bill, some GOP members are vowing to fight the measure.
The Tribune report reveals that U.S. Representative Bob Barr, R-Ga., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, is leading the fight against this bill in the House. Barr says that the search and seizure provisions of the bill "have nothing to do with methamphetamines," and he believes that had the search and seizure provision been introduced as a separate bill, its chances for passage "would be very, very problematic."
"These are not minor changes," Barr added. "These are substantive and far-reaching changes to the criminal law on search and seizure. It's unconscionable that someone would try to sneak these provisions into an unrelated bill."
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