> That's literally nonsense. Morality is an abstraction of what constitutes proper behavior. An arbiter is a particular body that judges disputes. In the United States, that judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court, per article III of the Constitution. Your concept of the Constitution as a moral agent, ignored by the rest of the government (including the Supreme Court) is just irrational.
In this paragraph, you called my position "nonsense" and "irrational," yet you gave no reason for those claims whatsoever. I agree with the other stuff you said, modulo I'm not sure how you define "moral agent."
The point is, morality DOES exist, irrespective of what any person or government does or says. This is the normal English use of "morality." Government action can either be in line with that, or contradict it. I'm not saying that the Constitution is the source or morality or an arbiter of morality. It's just that the 4th amendment _is_ in accordance with morality, along with the rest of the Constitution, broadly speaking.
> That doesn't make the entire government illegitimate.
So, what's the line? Clearly if the government didn't respect articles I, II, and III of the constitution whatsoever, and just appointed a dictator, it would not be legitimate. On the other hand, if it makes a minor (but illegal) clerical error, it is clearly still legitimate.
_My_ answer to this is that there is no set threshold; it's just a strategic question, a matter of rhetoric. So I don't think there is anything weighing on this topic. What do you think the threshold is?
> If you have read it you have certainly not understood it. Your arguments border upon the delusional.
That's just ridiculous. You keep saying this, but you haven't made a convincing argument that I'm wrong about anything, much less _delusional_, which is an entirely different beast altogether.
I'm not sure if you understand that there is a potential difference between what is right and wrong, and what is actually written into law.
In this paragraph, you called my position "nonsense" and "irrational," yet you gave no reason for those claims whatsoever.
Javert, my reasons are given in the third and fourth sentences, where I define the term 'arbiter' and then observe that the constitution assigns the judicial power of the country to the Supreme Court. You have denied that the SC is the arbiter of constitutional questions on things like rights and privileges. I find your position nonsensical and irrational because it is in conflict with the plain language of the Constitution and with the fact that the Supreme Court has been functioning in this role ever since the its inception.
When you talk about the legitimacy of the government, you're making a legal assertion. You are certainly entitled to your own opinion of what you consider to be moral, but when you make legal assertions on the basis of your personal moral code in complete disregard of how the governance of the US is constitutionally organized, then I view those assertions as fundamentally flawed. DannyBee has cited specific case law elsewhere in the thread that shows the error in your position.
If you are simply going to dismiss anything you disagree with as being morally deficient that's up to you, but your moral opinions are wholly subjective. The objective reality here is what the judicial branch holds to be the meaning of the constitution, regardless of how your or I feel about the morality or quality or their jurisprudence.
I have nothing further to say on this topic, and I think you know perfectly well what I meant in the first place.
I understand your point in the first paragraph, now.
There is legal, and there is moral. The SC is the final, ultimate arbiter of _legality_, not morality.
This isn't a conflict with the Constitution, it's just a "meta-Constitutional" issue.
You act like this is a bizarre notion, but it's actually the common-sense one. First, nobody holds the Constitution as a moral document, only as a legal one. Second, the founding fathers clearly articulated (and demonstrated) that when a government becomes tyrannical, it can and should be overthrown.
Now, putting all that aside, there is a separate issue, which is that the government doesn't follow the 4th amendment. Thus, it is acting both illegally _and_ immorally. Though I see that you would probably say it's legal if the SC rules it OK. I guess it would be "legal" to enslave people, if the SC ruled it to be OK under the constitution? I mean, can the SC just make _anything_ legal by "interpreting" the constitution _however_ it wants to? (Rhetorical question, not asking for a response.)
> your moral opinions are wholly subjective.
No, they're objective, but I don't expect that to sound reasonable to a non-philosopher (or even most philosophers).
> I think you know perfectly well what I meant in the first place.
I resent the implication that I'm just arguing for the sake of argument, which simply isn't the case.
> I have nothing further to say on this topic
I respect your wish to close the conversation, and I feel the same way.
I think you pulled "the government doesn't follow the 4th Amendment" out of the air.
The First Amendment is written in remarkably clear language. "Congress shall make no law". Every court that has confronted the First Amendment has pointed out that there's very little wiggle room in it. And yet there is room to maneuver in the First Amendment. You can't yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater; you can't stand outside a small-town prison and encourage a mob to lynch one of its inmates. This goes beyond "speech plus action"; there are messages that are unprotected by the First Amendment.†
Now look again at the Fourth Amendment. What does the word "unreasonable" mean? Do you think the Framers just slipped up and wrote one of the most important amendments in the Bill of Rights sloppily? Or do you, like every Supreme Court since the ratification of the Constitution, think that the Fourth Amendment is designed to balance the needs of the state against those of the people, and that's why they put a wildcard like "reasonable" in the text?
TSA searches are lawful under the "Administrative Search" doctrine. Searches can be allowed as "administrative" when they are (a) not targeted to specific classes of people, (b) avoidable --- as in, nobody is coming to your house or stopping your car on the road to search you, and (c) balanced against a legitimate need of the state (in this case, the safety of commercial airliners).
I think the TSA is patently ridiculous and they piss me off just as much as they piss you off. But they are not unconstitutional. The Constitution allows plenty of room for Congress to make dumb decisions, and this was one of them.
What constitutes "unreasonable"? IANAL, but presumably, it would be doing something without having a good reason to do it, which is what's happening here. (Looking back, this looks sarcastic, but I didn't mean that sarcastically.)
Under your way of looking about it, that whole amendment is completely worthless, because "reasonable" is anything.
> balance the needs of the state against those of the people
There is no such thing as a "need of the state" that is opposed to "needs of the people." They're one in the same. I'm not claiming this is obvious, but I'm claiming that it's true. (BTW, there are no "needs of the people" apart from "needs of specific, individual people.")
Tangentially, your example of "avoidable" administrative searches actually is self-defeating. Air travel and road travel are completely analogous in every relevant way. So, the laws of the country are inconsistent.
Specifically, if commercial air travel is avoidable ("Hey, just drive from North Carolina to California,") then so is car travel ("Hey, just walk to work every day").
I mean, hell, why don't we just "avoid" going out of the house each morning?
The lawyers SHOULD go, "Hey, we can't stop cars on the roads without a reasonable cause, so we can't stop all air passengers, either." Of course, instead they'll just go, "Hey, now we can use the TSA to screen cars, too!" Talk about the erosion of rights.
The entire definition of "unreasonable" can be distilled to balancing, for any given circumstance, the privacy interests of the searched against the state's interests. Similarly, it's not productive to litigate whether the state properly has interests. This one, based on a couple hundred years jurisprudence, does: the state's interests include law enforcement, national security, and the safety of its citizens.
You could then easily come up with a scenario in which a roadside search was lawful. For instance, SCOTUS has found some roadside sobriety checkpoints to be lawful (I am perhaps even angrier about sobriety checkpoints than I am about the TSA!)
These aren't controversial points and they aren't points I made up.
I feel like I have to keep saying this in every comment: there are more ways for laws to be wrong than "unconstitutional". I think the TSA is a farce and that it's offensive to core American values. But it's a farce that Congress was within its rights to create.
In this paragraph, you called my position "nonsense" and "irrational," yet you gave no reason for those claims whatsoever. I agree with the other stuff you said, modulo I'm not sure how you define "moral agent."
The point is, morality DOES exist, irrespective of what any person or government does or says. This is the normal English use of "morality." Government action can either be in line with that, or contradict it. I'm not saying that the Constitution is the source or morality or an arbiter of morality. It's just that the 4th amendment _is_ in accordance with morality, along with the rest of the Constitution, broadly speaking.
> That doesn't make the entire government illegitimate.
So, what's the line? Clearly if the government didn't respect articles I, II, and III of the constitution whatsoever, and just appointed a dictator, it would not be legitimate. On the other hand, if it makes a minor (but illegal) clerical error, it is clearly still legitimate.
_My_ answer to this is that there is no set threshold; it's just a strategic question, a matter of rhetoric. So I don't think there is anything weighing on this topic. What do you think the threshold is?
> If you have read it you have certainly not understood it. Your arguments border upon the delusional.
That's just ridiculous. You keep saying this, but you haven't made a convincing argument that I'm wrong about anything, much less _delusional_, which is an entirely different beast altogether.
I'm not sure if you understand that there is a potential difference between what is right and wrong, and what is actually written into law.