Strip Searches: The Republican State of Mind

Nothing draws a brighter line between the Republican Party and the Democrats than the issue of strip searching prisoners.

This is not something that your government will do to you only if you are captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan or if you are caught with a bloody knife outside the home of a murder victim.

This happens to nuns arrested for protesting against a war in Washington, DC or to a man who was stopped by police because his taillight was out and the police computer said (incorrectly) there was a warrant for his arrest. It can happen to your daughter if she is arrested fro speeding and taken to a station house. It can happen if your wife is stopped and she doesn't have her driver's license with her.

The Republican majority just voted again to deny the complaint against unreasonable search and seizure made by the man who was stripped searched after having been arrested, erroneously, because the computer had got it wrong.

The Republican majority on the Court reasoned it was just fine to do a strip search on this innocent man because when you first bring into a police station any person, you have no way of knowing whether he is a mass murderer.

That was Justice Kennedy's argument. Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a federal building was arrested on a traffic violation and brought to the station house and think what a monster he was! Of course, nowhere is it suggested that strip searching this Hannibal the Cannibal in any way protected or could have protected the police who arrested him. He did not have a bomb stowed up his rectum.

And remember, we are talking about people arrested on the street by police, and these people have not been convicted of anything.

As Kayla Williams noted in her memoir, Love My Rifle More than You, the Army stripped anyone they arrested in Iraq simply to humiliate them and to assert control over them.

She was part of that process--they wanted a female present to really humiliate their prisoners.

Sherrif Arpaio in Arizona, another Republican rising star, marches prisoners through the streets in their underwear, before their trials.

For all their talk about liberty and freedom, from the Tea Party to the Free Stater wing of the Republican party, to the main stream justices of the Supreme Court, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Kennedy, the Republicans are only indignant about a loss of freedom when it means regulators from the government may impose regulations about how industry can despoil the environment. When it comes to governmental police laying the heavy wood on some powerless citizen--go right ahead. As Rush Limbaugh said of Abu Gharib, well that was only boys blowing off steam, just a fraternity stunt.

Justice Scalia declaims he is only following the original intent of the framers of the constitution. Nowhere were these eighteenth century gentlemen more clear than when they talked about cruel and unusual punishments or unreasonable search and seizure. This is something that goes back to their time. They were very familiar with sadistic police, with bullies in uniforms.

This should be a gift horse to the Democratic party.

Every Republican ought to be asked:

1/ Do you support strip searching arrested citizens?

2/ Would you support a law in New Hampshire to forbid or severely limit the circumstances under which prisoners could be stripped in police stations?

This is a liberty litmus test and Democrats ought to rub the Republican faces in it.