alt Hacker NewsHas anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
Replies
Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.
So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.
Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?
Or we can "keep acting" like there's no duly-constituted amendment process.
In the context of this thread, that would (ideally) fall under Congress’s purview, not the Supreme Court.
It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment.
I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has demonstrated in its overturning of Roe v. Wade that the risk of leaving it up to SCOTUS to synthesize "prenumbrae" and rights to privacy (which would have not been a thing anyone would have written in the 1700s) is that reasonable people can disagree on what those things are, unless you write them down explicitly in the document that requires a lot of effort to change.
A majority-conservative Supreme Court's on an originalism kick, so we're very much stuck "when the sacred texts were written".
That's something that gets me every time I hear phrases like 'exact reading' of the Constitution. Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them. The spirit and intent was clear. We're just willfully ignoring that intent because it would be inconvenient for big brother to do the snooping.