The Fourth Amendment is not negotiable. Ban sobriety checkpoints.
Our constitutional rights have been violated for too long by power-hungry legislators and greedy government employees.
I have long held the belief that sobriety checkpoints should be criminalized: That every state legislature should pass laws banning local and state police from stopping all drivers going through a specific location. The text of the Fourth Amendment is clear: Our right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" against unreasonable searches without a warrant based on probable cause "shall not be violated."
Our founding fathers, having just fought a brutal and bloody war of secession due to the oppression of the British Empire, would be horrified by sobriety checkpoints. They would never have defended these searches by claiming "I have nothing to hide." You are stopped by armed agents of the state, and you are then required to show a government-issued ID card to prove you are not breaking the law? Even worse, this unreasonable detainment and search is paid for by a grant from the federal government. Do people not understand history at all?
The responses to this are as predictable as they are childish. "Got busted for DUI, did you?" "Found the drunk driver." This is to be expected on social media, where snarky trolls who cannot make a coherent argument about law or policy post insults instead. What is inexcusable is when a "newspaper" viciously personally attacks people for holding an opinion on public policy that differs from the editorial board.
Of course, there are plenty of emotional appeals, pointing to people maimed and killed by drunk drivers. A common refrain is something like this: "If you saw the trauma unit, you would change your position." But no one is saying that we should do nothing about drunk driving. There are plenty of policies that we could (and do) implement to restrict drunk driving without infringing on the liberty of law-abiding citizens, and those policies have worked. We had about 18,000 drunk driving fatalities in 1985, and about 13,500 drunk driving fatalities in 2022. This is despite the fact that our population was 238 million people in 1985, and 333 million people in 2022.
We need to be honest about the real reason for these checkpoints, and to do that we should follow the money: Much of the point of these checkpoints is not to stop drunk drivers, but to get overtime pay for the police. The Herald-Times reported in 2014 that police officers manning sobriety checkpoints "work on an overtime basis and are paid by federal and state grant funds." This overtime pay can be very lucrative for state employees.
It is time to put an end to all of this. Our constitutional rights have been violated for too long by power-hungry legislators and greedy government employees. We need to start electing constitutional conservatives who are dedicated to preserving our liberties, and throw out those statists who are not. We should stop tolerating the mentality that welcomes restrictions on our liberty and privacy to "keep us safe." The Fourth Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, should not be negotiable.