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Notes -
Supreme Court roundup thread? They dropped four opinions today that have some pretty wide ranging implications. Some more than others.
In Chatrie v. United States a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that geofence warrants constitute a "search" under the 4th amendment. This does not necessarily resolve the case in favor of Chatrie, though. The government did have a warrant in this case, although it's not clear whether the warrant was "reasonable." SCOTUS here is mostly pushing back on the holding by the Fourth Circuit panel that a search had not even occurred under the fourth amendment, due to the third party doctrine.
In Watson v. Republican National Committee a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) the court holds that federal laws specifying an election day do not pre-empt state laws that permit counting ballots received after that day, so long as the ballots are sent by that day.
In Trump v. Slaughter a 6-3 court holds that the "for-cause" removal provision for FTC commissioners is unconstitutional, overruling Humphrey's Executor. This was pretty widely anticipated, since the Supreme Court has gradually been expanding the President's power to remove officials since Trump's re-election.
In Trump v. Cook a 5-4 court (Roberts and Kavanaugh joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that the President may not fire members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governor's at-will. The for-cause provision regarding firing members of the Feds BoG is constitutional and sets a "substantial threshold" for what constitutes cause.
Most online discussion I've seen has been focused on the latter two decisions and their apparent inconsistency. Apparently, Congress can only insulate executive branch employees from Presidential termination some of the time and those circumstances do not depend on the wording of the statute or anything else Congress has any control over. Roberts is the author of both opinions and he tries to square the circle by arguing that the United States has a long history of independent central banking but I don't think he's very convincing. The Federal Reserve itself is a mere 1 year older than the FTC (founded in 1913 vs 1914) so Roberts tries to reach back to the First and Second Bank of the United States and nevermind the fact there was an 80 year period where the United States had no central bank between the Second Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve. Some of the syllabus even, in my view, departs from anything that could be called a legal argument to argue that this is good policy:
The court has also said tomorrow will be the last opinion day, in which we will presumably get the four remaining opinions (including birthright citizenship) so maybe I'll have to do another one tomorrow.
Chatrie joins a host of other weird post-Carpenter lower court cases (pole cameras, mosaic cases, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore) where connection between the 4th Amendment's text and a more general free-standing limit on police action gets messy. If the rest of 4th Amendment caselaw wasn't such a clusterfuck, this wouldn't be so rough, but instead simultaneously a) if you're guilty, you can get out of it by arguing the police searched someone else too aggressively, b) if you're innocent, you have no recourse but being found not-guilty, and c) a host of other actual search of you specifically still don't count because mumblemumble. And it's just a punt onto the merits: I fully expect the
5thED: 4th to go "okay, it's a reasonable search", maybe even snark about how technically precedent doesn't require warranted searches to be reasonable, and then SCOTUS to deny cert on the eventual appeal.Watson is one of those cases where the textualist and originalist arguments could genuinely go either way. In theory, Congress could answer the question, in practice it won't. And military ballots make the election day cutoff hard to abide by (even if the Clinton-era mess makes everyone hypocrites).
Cook is... ugh. It's an important enough case that, as much as I bitch about Kavanaugh's results-oriented position, I at least have sympathy for it here. But on top of the questionable legal grounding, it's a decision answering arguments not even at question before the court, while punting the actual matter in question into an unsolvable procedural gimmick so it'll go away and not come back.
Why wouldn't it be a reasonable search, given that the police in Chatrie had a warrant?
The only thing the Supreme Court seems to be saying here is that you can't completely punt the issue by declaring it a non-search (because reasons) rather than a reasonable one.
My personal read of the Fourth Amendment is that the warrant clause is disjoint from the right to be secure from unreasonable seizures, and a warrant does not automatically make a search reasonable. But, to be clear, SCOTUS does not agree with me. McNeely holds that a blood draw is perfectly valid as a subject of a warrant. I think this leads to very bad places, as evidenced by what rubber-stamp warrants often lead to, but that's just my position.
And, yeah, it's a punt-of-a-punt from SCOTUS.
Obviously there's evidence you can get from a blood draw for certain crimes that are extremely important and also potentially exculpatory, and I don't see the reason why a blood draw would be in itself unreasonable.
Agreed.
If you do not allow the drawing of blood for evidence, then any DUI laws become basically unenforceable. At best, they would become a shit-throwing fest with cops arguing that according to their eyewitness testimony, you were clearly inebriated. I will rather take my chances with the BAC results of a forensic technician any day of the week, thank you very much.
If instead you want to get a warrant to draw blood of a pedestrian sitting in a park because you want to convict them of being on some illegal narcotics, then I am much less sympathetic because the scope of the alleged crime does not fit the invasiveness of the search, and would argue that any such warrant is unreasonable. (I do not think this is a common MO for cops though, typically they want to catch you with the substance in a bag instead of in your blood.)
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It's not quite as bad as you make it out -- SCOTUS has placed limits on warrants, at least as to generality and specificity. Groh v. Ramirez & Riley v. California come to mind. They only mostly disagree with you :-)
Also, while McNeely holds that a blood draw is valid, Winston v Lee holds that a surgery to remove a bullet isn't. So there's some cognizable limit there too.
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