Quote:
Originally Posted by theking
It is my understanding that one or more provisions of the Patriot Act has been litigated by the Federal Supreme Court and it would seem to me that there has been more than enough time pass that every provision...that one thinks violates there rights...would have been litigated by now.
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King, that's just not how it works. Lawyers don't get a roving commission to contest every part of the law. It depends on aggrieved clients who want to challenge something that affects them. To challenge a law, you must have "standing", which means a concrete connection to the provision you are challenging. When taxpayers attempted to challenge that part of the income tax that funded the Vietnam War, they were thrown out of court. Without that connection, you cannot stay in court. It must be a very particularized connection. In some historic cases, the Supreme Court has held that only Congress itself has standing to challenge some executive orders. There is no system by which each and every law gets routinely strutinized by some panel of lawyers and gets challenged in court. No, the passage of time really doesn't have anything to do with it. It's a very tiny part of the statutes that have ever been brought to court for a determination of validity.
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964