In Ohio, where I live part time, the state Supreme Court just upheld that decision a traffic court verdict for speeding based solely on a policeman’s guess at the driver’s speed, which now institutionalizes a change in the law. Radar guns are no longer needed. Officers are now encouraged to issue speeding tickets based solely on their opinion on how rapid the car is moving. If it looks like you’re going too rapid, even by one mile per hour, that’s enough. You are guilty.
This is basic to discredit. Ask a police officer to guess the speed of a passing red Corvette, a tedious gray minivan, and a UPS delivery van that are actually traveling at exactly the same speed. Would you bet it indicates that a red sports car is going faster than a minivan or UPS truck? Of course, if he turns out to be a racist, he might just think that a car driven by a black guy goes faster than a car driven by a white guy.
In Arizona, where I have lived for a long time and would not risk my life by living now, the state legislature passed a bill that reaffirms existing federal law that makes it illegal to be there as an illegal immigrant (i.e., a criminal). ), but still allows police officers to ask questions about citizenship status only in situations where the person has already been detained or employed for another reason. Even then, the officer must have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person he stopped for another reason may also be there illegally. The same law specifically prohibits racial or ethnic profiling.
Over this bill, President Obama set himself on fire, slandered the very tired legal citizens of Arizona as well as their elected officials, threatened to charge the governor with the Department of Justice, all based on his insistence that Arizona police officers cannot be trusted correct application of this law. They will be tempted, he says, to employ this as a means of unfairly discriminating and harassing some citizens and non-citizens.
So far, the president has remained noiseless on Ohio’s law.
The Arizona law that so offends him risks unfair treatment of only a tiny percentage of the state’s population. Ohio’s law, which has not been mentioned, let alone threatened to be trespassed and overturned, endangers all citizens and offers comparable opportunities for misuse and abuse as is feared to be the case in Arizona.
By opposing Arizona’s law, he assumes bad intentions and abuses – or at least incompetence – on the part of law enforcement officers (this is not a recent conclusion for Obama; remember how the Cambridge police acted “stupidly?”). If the evidence suggests that Obama assumes that police officers generally cannot be trusted to apply laws correctly and without abuse, he should direct his ire at Ohio as well.
Moreover, Ohio’s law outrageously upends the protection of an innocent person until proven guilty. Arizona law is much narrower and more cautious. For example, it does not allow a law enforcement officer to determine that someone is an illegal immigrant based solely on his best guess about the person’s immigration status. If the president wants to condemn the state, its legislature, its governor and its state laws, he would have much more justification for this idiocy in Ohio than for the measures of desperation in Arizona.
But Ohio’s governor is a Democrat and Arizona’s a Republican, and he won’t be intimidated. And Arizona’s law affects a demographic that liberals see as natural Democratic voters once they can grant them amnesty and citizenship.
Meddling with states’ rights is a slippery slope. The U.S. Supreme Court has a constitutional mandate to do this to a confined extent. The president is not invited. But if he’s going to invite himself, honesty dictates that he find an inappropriate law unique to each state. And for that matter, in every county, city, district, school board, school. Why not pick one in each place, make a master list, organize a Presidential Task Force, and with equal hands and a simultaneous attack correct the far-reaching injustice?
Maybe the media would support. Instead of joining the president in his attack on Arizona, they should conduct state-by-state investigations and develop laws that could allow police abuse or otherwise be unfairly applied. They could give Obama a whole catalog of offensive state laws, policies and practices for him to fix.
