Police State Culture

War, violence, and the militarization of police in a declining American culture.

What Cop T-Shirts Tell Us About Police Culture

Earlier this week, an anonymous public defender sent Gothamist this photo of an NYPD warrant squad officer wearing a t-shirt with a pretty disturbing quote from Ernest Hemingway:

George Will recently noticed Randolph Bourne’s axiom, “war is the health of the state,” has been validated too.

Slipping the constitutional leash

Today, as another war is enlarging government’s intrusiveness … it is timely to remember that war is not the only … Or, more precisely, actual war is not the only cause. Ersatz “wars” — domestic wars on various real or imagined vices — also wound the defense of limited government. So argue David B. Kopel and Trevor Burrus in their essay “Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Gambling and Guns: The Synergistic Constitutional Effects.”

Kopel and Burrus … cite the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act … as an early example of morals legislation passed using Congress’s enumerated taxing power as a pretext. In 1919, the Supreme Court held that the law “may not be declared unconstitutional because its effect may be to accomplish another purpose as well as the raising of revenue .”

Its “effect”? The effect of suppressing the drug business obviously was its purpose. Nevertheless, the court held that even if “motives” other than raising revenue really explained Congress’s exercise of its enumerated power, the law still could not be invalidated “because of the supposed motives which induced it.”

“Supposed”? The court’s refusal to reach a reasonable conclusion about the pretext Congress used in this case for trespassing on territory reserved to the states enabled the federal government to begin slipping its constitutional leash. In 1922, Chief Justice William Howard Taft warned that Congress could seize control of “the great number of subjects” reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment by imposing a “so-called tax” on any behavior it disapproved of: “To give such magic to the word ‘tax’ would be to break down all constitutional limitation of the powers of Congress and completely wipe out the sovereignty of the states.”

Today, Congress exercises police powers never granted by the Constitution. Conservatives who favor federal “wars” on drugs, gambling and other behaviors should understand the damage they have done to the constitutional underpinnings of limited government.

Cop tasers an 11-year old autistic girl.

Meanwhile “conservatives” declare Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning traitors “who should be shot” for exposing the State’s crimes. Licensed immorality …

To think America’s founders went to war over a few pennies in tax …

Today the US federal government confiscates more of its subjects hard-earned cash than any other regime in all of history. America’s experiment in “limited-government” has produced the biggest, most powerful government the world has ever known. Turning their backs on their forefathers even more, Americans now embrace the intrusiveness, heavy-taxation and violence of the State … because it simply yells “Boo!”

The Prevalence of War

Of all faces of the present age in America, the military face would almost certainly prove the most astounding to any Framers of the Constitution, any Founders of the Republic who came back to inspect their creation on the occasion of the bicentennial. It is indeed an imposing face, the military. [Nearly $1 trillion] a year go into its maintenance; it is deployed in several dozen countries around the world. The returned Framers would not be surprised to learn that so vast a military has inexorable effects upon the economy, the structure of government, and even the culture of Americans; they had witnessed such effects in Europe from afar, and had not liked what they saw. What would doubtless astonish the Framers most, though, is that their precious republic has become an imperial power in the world, much like the Great Britain they had hated in the eighteenth century.

Police State Culture is a post from: Classic Liberal Blog

Source: http://the-classic-liberal.com/police-state-culture/