NSA metadata program “consistent” with Fourth Amendment, Kavanaugh once argued
I don&#x27;t like articles like this. The article itself is great <i>if you actually read it</i>, but in a world of news aggregators I think most people read the headline and promptly come to their conclusion: Kavanaugh is another stooge, just like Scalia before him, claiming righteousness under the flag of &quot;originalism&quot; but in practice serving corporate and partisan interests through legal (read: gobbledygook) bullshit.<p>As much as I want these programs to be ended, the fact of the matter is that there&#x27;s no coming back from a government with broken courts. If the supreme court ever gets to the point where one party is packing it and they&#x27;re ignoring precedent, that&#x27;s game over. People will be shooting each other. Don&#x27;t believe for one second that our country or our time in history is special, it&#x27;s on the table and as long as humans are forming institutions it will always be on the table.<p>You can equally argue that there&#x27;s also no coming back from a government that no longer respects civil liberties, but that&#x27;s irrelevant to a conversation about who we ought to put on the courts. Kavanaugh is looking to become a member of the least oscillative part of American government, and I&#x27;m personally glad that he places the sanctity of that institution over everything else --- yes, even the values of the constitution.<p>To anyone who reads the full article and comes away believing that Kavanaugh is in the wrong, I have to wonder what criteria you believe he <i>should</i> be using to decide his position when answering questions like this. It&#x27;s unreasonable to say, &quot;He should just look at the constitution and see that these programs are at odds with the 4th amendment and we&#x27;ll just fix everything in one fell swoop.&quot; The court can&#x27;t operate like that.<p>Be angry at the precedent. Be angry at the legislators who wrote the Patriot Act. Be angry at the ISPs for cooperating so freely. Be angry at yourself for not making or using technology that makes their spying irrelevant. But don&#x27;t blame the court for putting their responsibility to self-preserve over their responsibility to bail society out of our collective bad decisions.<p>edit: s&#x2F;precedence&#x2F;precedent&#x2F;g