Dr. Wes
When you’re a Supreme Court Justice, you’re probably taking heat - and packing it too
While we were waiting for the Supreme Court to make a reasonable and intelligent decision on the case against the Obama health care law, the court made another little decision that made us think we were all probably expecting too much. If anyone who gets arrested in this country—for whatever reason—gets strip-searched, the Supremes are OK with that.
It leaves us to wonder what sort of planet this would have to be in order for this decision to have made sense. When we figure that out, the hope is we will be able to better learn to communicate with the Supreme Court justices, perhaps using sign language, or musical notes, or holding up pictures of light spectra and diagrams of atoms with labels teaching our numbering system. Perhaps a pair of drawings of human beings, one male and one female, could show them how we Earthlings appear.
Apparently SCOTUS is of the view that ordinary people driving, or passengers in cars, with no particular reason to expect to be arrested in a routine traffic stop, have nevertheless prepared themselves for that eventuality and for the inevitable urge to slay an unsuspecting guard in a jail, by secreting weapons in their body cavities.
One possibility is that the judges who voted for the majority in this decision have indicated their own practices. I always thought Alito had something up his back when he was deciding cases, but I had assumed it was something more like a two-by-four than a shiv.
This is America, after all, the country with the highest incarceration rate on Planet Earth. Alito knows that; he’s helped rule in a lot of the cases that have brought us that distinction. So even he has to worry that he might get picked up and booked for possession of suspicious contraband, such as house keys or a bottle of aspirin, because that’s the kind of country he helped create.
But he’s an angry man, and he knows it. He has no doubt that once in jail, even though he has no hope of escape, he’s going to want to tear someone a new one. So it just stands to reason that he needs to carry a proper pig-poker in his personal pocket, 24-7, year-round.
What about Scalia? Would he not want to be prepared to blow himself up at any moment to protect the secret location of his home planet from being discovered, lest we Earthlings choose to build an interplanetary space fleet to lay waste to it in revenge for all he has done to us?
So of course, if Scalia is always walking around with a hand grenade where no hand should be, just in case, it’s only natural that he would suppose we were all doing the same.
One of the things that may have been missed about the arguments applied to this case is that the justification given for strip searches actually could force cities and states to use them. Because the justification is that anyone who is jailed is a threat, that justification is falsified if exceptions are made. You can’t not strip search some people and continue to claim the justification, without inviting further litigation on the grounds of unequal application of the law.
Therefore in any state where this Supreme Court decision applies (thankfully, state constitutions are often saner than our federal one) police departments may have no choice but to make no exceptions.
So the next thing to watch for is mass arrests accompanied by strip searches at political protests. The way the government is evolving, I expect the strip searches will be conducted assembly-line style, maybe even before protesters are put into police vans.
The sooner protesters are strip-searched the safer our police-citizens will be from them.
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