Potential Executive Order On Gun Reform
Today Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that Biden is prepared to sign an executive order on gun reform to avoid a divided Congress.
She told reporters she could not provide an “exact time frame” on when these orders would leave his desk, but said,
One of the levers that we can use…to help address the prevalence of gun violence and address community safety around the country.
Gun-control activists and progressives have complained about his shift in tone, as Biden made it clear Thursday that his next focus would be infrastructure, not gun control.
Psaki said Biden understands the frustration but tells them to direct their anger at Congress for not getting anything done and blocking the bill, according to a Yahoo report.
We would say that the frustration should be vented at the members of the House and Senate who voted against the measure the president supports.
Overthrowing Our Amendments
On Wednesday, March 24th, the Supreme Court began hearings on the case of Caniglia v. Strom. This court case would essentially result in the breach of the fourth amendment. The Biden Administration and attorney generals from nine other states are advocating the Court uphold the ability for police to be able to enter homes without a warrant and search the house for guns.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Article IV of the U.S. Constitution
Nick Sibilla of Forbes tells the story of how this case reached the Court.
In August 2015, 68-year-old Edward Caniglia joked to Kim, his wife of 22 years, that he didn’t use a certain coffee mug after his brother-in-law had used it because he “might catch a case of dishonesty.” That quip quickly spiraled into an hour-long argument. Growing exhausted from the bickering, Edward stormed into his bedroom, grabbed an unloaded handgun, and put it on the kitchen table in front of his wife. With a flair for the dramatic, he then asked: “Why don’t you just shoot me and get me out of my misery?”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tactic backfired and the two continued to argue. Eventually, Edward took a drive to cool off. But when he returned, their argument flared up once again. This time, Kim decided to leave the house and spend the night at a motel. The next day, Kim phoned home. No answer.
Worried, she called the police in Cranston, Rhode Island and asked them to perform a “well check” on her husband and to escort her home. When they arrived, officers spoke with Edward on the back deck. According to an incident report, he “seemed normal,” “was calm for the most part,” and even said “he would never commit suicide.”
However, none of the officers had asked Edward any questions about the factors relating to his risk of suicide, risk of violence, or prior misuse of firearms. (Edward had no criminal record and no history of violence or self-harm.) In fact, one of the officers later admitted he “did not consult any specific psychological or psychiatric criteria” or medical professionals for his decisions that day.
Still, police were convinced that Edward could hurt himself and insisted he head to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. After refusing and insisting that his mental health wasn’t their business, Edward agreed only after police (falsely) promised they wouldn’t seize his guns while he was gone.
Compounding the dishonesty, police then told Kim that Edward had consented to the confiscation. Believing the seizures were approved by her husband, Kim led the officers to the two handguns the couple owned, which were promptly seized. Even though Edward was immediately discharged from the hospital, police only returned the firearms after he filed a civil rights lawsuit against them.
Critically, when police seized the guns, they didn’t claim it was an emergency or to prevent imminent danger. Instead, the officers argued their actions were a form of “community caretaking,” a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.
Initially created by the Supreme Court almost 50 years ago, the community caretaking exception was designed for cases involving impounded cars and highway safety, on the grounds that police are often called to car accidents to remove nuisances like inoperable vehicles on public roads, according to the Forbes report.
The remainder of the report is from Nick Sibilla of Forbes:
Both a district and appellate court upheld the seizures as “reasonable” under the community caretaking exception. In deciding Caniglia’s case, the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals acknowledged that “the doctrine’s reach outside the motor vehicle context is ill-defined.” Nevertheless, the court decided to extend that doctrine to cover private homes, ruling that the officers “did not exceed the proper province of their community caretaking responsibilities.”
Siding with law enforcement, the First Circuit noted that a police officer “must act as a master of all emergencies, who is ‘expected to…provide an infinite variety of services to preserve and protect community safety.’” By letting police operate without a warrant, the community caretaking exception is “designed to give police elbow room to take appropriate action,” the court added.
In their opening brief for the Supreme Court, attorneys for Caniglia warned that
extending the community caretaking exception to homes would be anathema to the Fourth Amendment [because it] would grant police a blank check to intrude upon the home.
That fear is not unwarranted. In jurisdictions that have extended the community caretaking exception to homes, “everything from loud music to leaky pipes have been used to justify warrantless invasion of the home,” a joint amicus brief by the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and the American Conservative Union revealed.
This expansion could also have perverse effects and disincentivize people from calling for help.
When every interaction with police or request for help can become an invitation for police to invade the home, the willingness of individuals to seek assistance when it is most needed will suffer.
The brief noted
But in its first amicus brief before the High Court, the Biden Administration glossed over these concerns and called on the justices to uphold the First Circuit’s ruling. Noting that “the ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is ‘reasonableness,’” the Justice Department argued that warrants should not be
presumptively required when a government official’s action is objectively grounded in a non-investigatory public interest, such as health or safety.
“The ultimate question in this case is therefore not whether the respondent officers’ actions fit within some narrow warrant exception,” their brief stated, “but instead whether those actions were reasonable,” actions the Justice Department felt were “justified” in Caniglia’s case.
As a fail-safe, the Justice Department also urged the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling on qualified immunity grounds, arguing that the officers’
actions did not violate any clearly established law so as to render the officers individually liable in a damages action.
But the Biden Administration, along with the courts that have extended the community caretaking exception, overlook a key component of the Fourth Amendment: the Security Clause. After all, the Fourth Amendment opens with the phrase, “the right of the people to be secure.”
In an amicus brief, the Institute for Justice noted that “to the Founding generation, ‘secure’ did not simply mean the right to be ‘spared’ an unreasonable search or seizure” but also involved “harms attributable to the potential for unreasonable searches and seizures.” Expanding the community caretaking exception to “allow warrantless entries into peoples’ homes on a whim,” argued the IJ brief, “invokes the arbitrary, looming threat of general writs that so incited the Framers” and would undermine “the right of the people to be secure” in their homes.
The IJ brief further argued that extending the “community caretaking” exception to the home would “flatly contradict” the Supreme Court’s prior rulings, which “has only discussed community caretaking in the context of vehicle searches and seizures.” In those cases, “the animating purpose for the exception [was] to allow officers to remove damaged or abandoned vehicles that pose a risk to public safety.” By contrast, the IJ amicus asserted, “that justification is entirely absent” when it comes to homes.
The Fourth Amendment protects our right to be secure in our property, which means the right to be free from fear that the police will enter your house without warning or authorization. A rule that allows police to burst into your home without a warrant whenever they feel they are acting as ‘community caretakers’ is a threat to everyone’s security.
Institute for Justice Attorney Joshua Windham
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.
Proverbs 29:2
[1] A Psalm of David. Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight: [2] My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me. [3] LORD, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! or the son of man, that thou makest account of him! [4] Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. [5] Bow thy heavens, O LORD, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. [6] Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them. [7] Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children; [8] Whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of falsehood.Psalms 144:1-8
More and more of our rights looked to be stripped, and eventually, they’ll get their way one or another. I highly doubt this fair well in the courts, but just the fact that this is even up for discussion paints a real ‘pretty’ picture as to where this nation is at. The way they’ll get this passed, like all other massive obstructions to freedom, the government and media will have to orchestrate another 9/11 or Plandemic of sorts to cause the knee-jerk reaction they need for the masses to cry for more of their rights to trodden upon.
And even if this where to pass, we all know police would so easily abuse this rule, and in the process could also see the third amendment obstructed. And besides that, it would result in a whole lot of dead police and homeowners. Police have absolutely no right for any reason to do this.
It is also becoming a clear reality that the police can not be relied upon. I am not saying that all individuals involved in law enforcement are bad as there are certainly some great cops out there, and I absolutely believe that we need police (unlike the arrogant morons that are calling for no police), but the system as a whole has become utterly unreliable. Just look at the nonsense surrounding Covid.
Give us your thoughts on this absurdity in the comments.
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