(Untitled)

[gunslnger]

To partially answer the question of why some people want smaller government, here are two examples.

Indiana Supreme Court: citizens have no right to resist unlawful police entry

Short version: A police officer is within his rights to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, while a homeowner is powerless to block or interfere in any with

Comments

[a_new_machine]

As a broader response: The Fourth Amendment forbids "unreasonable search and seizure." The real question is, "What is unreasonable?" Is smelling pot and (correctly) believing that they were destroying evidence of a crime (possession of a controlled substance) an unreasonable basis to enter a home? It is worth noting that there are two separate elements to the Fourth Amendment: the "unreasonable" clause, and the "warrant" clause. Nowhere are the two conflated. It is possible to have a reasonable search absent a warrant, by the very terms of the amendment.

On the cleaning claims: I'd have to investigate it more. Unfortunately neither article examines the environmental impacts of what was done before (the one about the TSP most glaringly, as it makes a fire-and-brimstone speech about the destruction of specialized labor and the fall of living standards back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels, while sneering with derision at the idea that "the environment" is more important than white shirts). Nor do they cite to a statute or regulation enforcing these changes.

Moreover, this doesn't necessarily answer the whole question. In fact, it beggars the question entirely. The posts you link presume an unstated conclusion - the environment is less important than thoroughly clean clothes, ergo regulators siding with the environment are bad. You'd have to demonstrate why clean clothes > environmental impact of cleaning clothes to prove that those regulations are bad. I think that's what the last post about what freedoms we protect was about - does freedom have inherent value, even if the outcomes it produces are bad?

[blue_mangos]

This does make a nice little companion piece to my post doesn't it?

[a_new_machine]

It definitely does. I realize I'm kinda driving it (and the law student in me demands that I respond to erroneous legal arguments on teh interwebz), but I think that this underlying point deserves more discussion than whether the actual searches he's targeting were reasonable or not.

[gunslnger]

Is smelling pot and (correctly) believing that they were destroying evidence of a crime (possession of a controlled substance) an unreasonable basis to enter a home?

Yes.

[a_new_machine]

Why is it unreasonable? That's a blanket assertion. What about it is against reason?

[gunslnger]

Because there are a multitude of other reasons why that smell could have been encountered, the crime is not such that it merits breaking down a door and trespassing, it is so unlikely that someone is burning marijuana for the purpose of "destroying evidence" that it's essentially never true, etc. Any one of those is enough to make it unreasonable.