DownWithTyranny!: Nat Hentoff wonders what we have to do to generate a little respect for the Bill of Rights

Governor Paterson seems more familiar with the
idea of civil liberties than a certain U.S. president.

by Ken

In the grand scheme of things, it's not the greatest blow struck for civil liberties, but it's still a blow, and these days there aren't many of those being struck, as Nat Hentoff (famous for, among many other things, a book called The War on the Bill of Rights) notes in his Village Voice column this week, "What Obama Could Learn From Paterson."

The Paterson in question is New York's brief tenured Gov. David Paterson, and the blow concerns the popular police practice of the stop-and-frisk. Governor Paterson signed a bill that prevents retention of records regarding stop-and-frisks that resulted in no further police action.

"In a democracy," Governor Paterson said, "there are times when safety and liberty find themselves in conflict. From the Alien and Sedition Acts [opposition to which gave Thomas Jefferson the presidency] to the Patriot Act, we have experienced moments where liberty took a back seat."

The police, you see, like to keep records of these citizen encounters because you never know, someday that information could prove useful in crime-stopping. The problem is that this allows the accumulation of records on citizens who are, as far as those encounters have revealed, completely innocent. And against the possibility of those records providing future information is the at least as great likely that they provide future misinformation.

[U]ntil this law, masses of New Yorkers accused of nothing at all remained in [Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly's computer in cas -- who knows? -- they are somehow connected in some way to some kind of alleged crime. Warned Paterson: "It is not unreasonable that these individuals could be targeted in future investigations even though no evidence of wrongdoing was found during the initial stop that warranted further legal action."

Is this America? It defined New York City justice until Paterson frisked [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and Kelly about their knowledge of the Constitution or privacy. He found nothing. Paterson said: "Simply justice as well as common sense suggests that those questioned by police and not accused of a crime should not be subjected to perpetual suspicion."

Now Nat is at pains to point out that the new law doesn't affect the legality of the stop-and-frisk itself. As long as the cop has "reasonable suspicion" of legally dubious behavior, he's home free. But it's no small things that the PD doesn't get to hold onto all that raw data. And as Nat points out, "If Rudy Giuliani had somehow been elected governor, can you imagine his ever signing into law what David Paterson did on the basis of simple justice?"

President Obama certainly hasn't offered any serious opposition to the crush against American liberties made possible by the specter of terror.

As president, Barack Obama has not done anything to make the Patriot Act more American. Indeed, when Democrats on the Judiciary Committee tried, once Obama was in the Oval Office, to enact a few reforms, the president helped the Republicans block most of them.

Nat cites the ACLU's July 22 report, "Obama Administration in Danger of Establishing 'New Normal' With Worst Bush-Era Policies," which --

ends with the grim conclusion that "if the Obama administration does not affect a fundamental break with Bush administration policies," it will "create a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, and then it will have ratified rather than rejected the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever."

Nat quotes "much underrated" former Supreme Court Justice David Souter's retirement warnings about American's loss of our true identity. He knows all too well that civil liberties aren't exactly an easily sold issue with the American public.

Years ago, I was writing a profile of Justice William Brennan, which became part of my book, Living the Bill of Rights (University of California Press). I was in his chambers at the Supreme Court, and was unusually somber.

"How," he suddenly asked me, "can we get the Bill of Rights off the pages and into the lives of students?"

I haven't heard that question in all the raging dissonance of how to "reform" education—and end its sentencing of so many of the young to largely dead-end lives. Some real-life changes, however, are being made in a number of schools around the country that focus on the critical-thinking skills of one student at a time instead of the collective test scores of a class, or a whole school, or a state.

I don't yet know how many of these still few schools are also bringing the Constitution into students' lives so that, as they become active citizens, they'll insist on their loyalty to the Constitution rather than to whichever government is in power.