Amercative

a•mer•ca•tive (uh mer' kuh tiv'), adj. 1. Characterized by a distinct influence of culture or way of thinking typical or stereotypical to the United States of America. An amercative policy. Amercative shopping is not affordable in Europe. Note: distinguished from American in that to be American is to be made in America or to be patriotic to America: a positive connotation. -tively adv., -tiveness noun.

There is no i between the r and c.

wis•to•des•sa•meing (wis' tuh dess' suh ming), n. 1. A misunderstanding which leads to a positive result. I met my wife Brandy through a wistodessameing, when I asked for a glass of liquor at the bar. -meings pl.

pange (panj') n. sing. 1. Trousers. This pange is too tight around the waste. panges pl.

hal•few (ha' fyoo) adj. 1. One and a half; half of three. I'll be there in a halfew hours. Also, hafew.

Students and Workers Unite for Human Rights

Can you imagine peasants and nobles from medieval Europe laying down their class differences to fight for better treatment of the peasants from the clergy? How about white southerners and undocumented Mexican immigrants joining forces to squeeze rights for the immigrants out of the government? Just this kind of interclass cooperation has been happening at both Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of California in Davis (UCD). Unionized workers in both universities had recognized that they were not being treated fairly by their employers and deserved higher wages and benefits, and both schools’ students immediately picked up the message. They joined hands with the workers to fight the administration and try to get the improvements in working conditions that the workers wanted. The fact that university students are supposed to be regarded as a different class than low wage workers is incongruous with the other fact that these two groups cooperated so fully and willingly to fight for better wages and conditions of the workers. But against all odds this cooperation went above and beyond expectations, gaining significant victories for both campaigns in the name of social justice. The breaking down of this social barrier between meritorious university students and low-wage or poverty level workers catalyzed an extremely efficient way to fight for a cause both of those groups viewed as just. The following comparative case study will explore the two aforementioned struggles and demonstrate how the worker-student relationship made these struggles a success.

In early 2007, the Associated Students of the University of California at Davis (ASUCD) passed a resolution that promoted higher wages and benefits to workers in the food service sector of the University. Their reasoning was simple: not only had all of the other UC’s switched from contracting their food service to university employment, but merely the fact of their being subcontracted makes them unique as employees of the University who cannot unionize and have few other privileges that UC employees enjoy. Students had helped workers organize a team to talk to the administration of the university, but the workers were denied UCD employment, setting the foundation for a labor movement. Throughout most of the first half of 2007, the students and workers campaigned by spreading information to other students and residents of the town, and held protests, at one of which 24 students were arrested while demonstrating. In response, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a nationwide union with over 1.6 million members which represents workers employed directly by the university, began to actively endorse the movement, putting even more pressure on the University. The Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef resisted the movement, claiming that a shift of such magnitude would cost millions of dollars, which would raise student fees, but justice-driven students demonstrated that they would prefer their workers to be well treated to having a lower tuition. After a final climactic protest and march on campus, the University at last began to take steps to resolve the conflict, culminating in an agreement signed in April of 2008 between AFSCME and UCD which helped raise food service workers’ wages by $1 to $3 an hour, and saw a stronger health care coverage and a monthly stipend of $100 to help offset the cost of living for the workers. The debate’s outstanding brevity and the fact that a strike was not needed to win the campaign shows that this was a very successful struggle.

Just short of ten years earlier, a longer, similar, but much more serious campaign had been launched on the opposite side of the nation at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the passing of a new resolution, the Cambridge City Council mandated a living wage of $10 per hour for all public workers, and encouraged all private companies to follow suit. The Harvard Corporation did not even cast a sideways glance at this ruling and continued as before. In response, students at the university organized the Living wage campaign to pressure the university to negotiate a better deal for the workers. Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss tell us that “in April 2001, Harvard students had engaged in the longest sit-in in the university’s history, spending three weeks occupying the office of the former president. They demanded a living wage for Harvard’s service workers―the janitors, food servers, and security guards―many of whom were working two and three jobs to support their families” (p. 171). The mission statement of the Living wage campaign itself points out how unacceptable it is that “few of the service workers at Harvard share in [its] health: many struggle to raise their families as the richest university in the world pays them poverty wages. … At any time in the past 360 years, Harvard could have implemented decent payment standards on its own. Its failure to do so reflects a serious disregard for the well-being of its workers, and sends the clear message that Harvard values profit over human dignity” (p. 1). Eventually, Harvard would allow a so-called “Katz Committee” to be formed out of some of the sitters-in to recommend changes in its policies. Although many of the recommendations of this committee were controversially inadequate, the struggle won several notable improvements. Guards’ and Janitors’ wages go up to between $11.35 and $13.50, and dining service workers’ wages become $10.85 per hour. Although the latter is still below Cambridge’s living wage ordinance at the time (of $11.11), it is a significant improvement to the earlier level of $9.

Although these two movements were nearly a decade apart, there were many things that they had in common, especially those that brought success. One of the contributing factors to the campaigns’ widespread popularity was the social capital, or connexions to vital organizations, that they both had. At UC Davis, the local union representing workers at UC Davis endorsed the food service workers and their student proponents, and indeed had been trying to push for the same results before the student campaign had started, albeit with little success. Alex Gourevitch, in his article “Awakening the Giant: How the Living Wage Movement Received Progressive Politics” tells us that this factor was even more substantial at Harvard, because the Living wage campaign “received tremendous support from labor―every local union in Cambridge endorsed the students. The local Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) 26, representing the dining hall workers, went a step further, authorizing a strike to support the sit-in, electing the sitters-in honorary members of the union, and voting to make academic immunity for the students a key bargaining point during June contract renegotiations,” and that “[w]hile students and labor were the most visibly active members of the living wage campaign at Harvard, civil rights groups and the religious left added key support” (p. 1). This broad base of contacts allowed both groups to do tremendous outreach and pressure their respective universities, which proved enough in the case of UC Davis to rule out even the necessity of a strike having to occur.

Another factor that the two campaigns had in common was their tremendous leverage based on how much they can threaten the university with. Even though at UC Davis, the campaign only concerned the food service workers, a work stoppage by these employees would be devastating. It would mean that all of the students living in the dormitories at the University would not be able to feed themselves where they most often eat―there are no kitchens inside of the dorms themselves, and no other nearby cheap food alternatives. But this would go beyond simply threatening to cause students severe discomfort. This would immediately travel to parents, who would become outraged that they are putting in tens of thousands of dollars per student to a university, and in return their children are being starved and mistreated. With this much leverage the university feels very threatened and even if they are trying to resist the change in the early stages, if a strike did happen they would try to resolve it at all costs. At Harvard the situation is even more drastic―the food service would stop, a lack of janitors would cause dirt and mess to build up to grotesque levels, and the absence of security forces would allow the entire campus to descend into mayhem―it would be like pulling the bottom out from underneath Harvard and letting its insides spill out. These services are so essential to the universities that without them they not only cannot operate, but pose a risk to the community of students living on the premises, and the threat of a strike by these workers was so unacceptable that the university would basically have to take whatever the workers wanted if it came down to a strike.

The last and arguably most vital point of similarity was the huge role that students had played in both of these campaigns. Alex Gourevitch explains that “the issue resonates with students because it is their tuition that universities are using to pay campus workers poverty wages, and many are unwilling to be implicated in injustice within their own community” (p. 1). Fantasia and Voss go on to say “it was a struggle that students initiated on their own, from their contact with service workers at the university, and that conjoined the tactics of the student movement with the immediate concerns not of the students themselves, but of a working class that is normally invisible on the academic radar screen” (p. 172). Though this latter quote is in reference to the living wage campaign at Harvard it applies to UC Davis just the same―the students are more likely to see the suffering of workers as a social justice issue needing immediate resolution than as a positive effect on their tuition prices. This cross-class sentiment provides a very powerful ally to workers―students have social and cultural capital that workers don’t, they have a much broader knowledge base as students, and are usually a lot more resourceful and have more free time than workers. This enables them to form such things as campaigns and teams to do sit-ins and disseminate information to the broader public on the workers’ behalf. Without the help of students, non-unionized workers at UC Davis may not have even had the right to organize, much less the resources, because since Sodexho (their subcontracting company) is a nation-wide firm, they would have had to gain the approval of more than half of all the workers employed by this giant to unionize at UC Davis, and most of these other people may not even have heard of such a place. (In fact, Sodexho was one of the subcontracting companies that workers at Harvard were having grievances with in the other campaign!) But with the help and outreach of students, especially students who were also employees of the universities, outreach became very real and the progress moved much more swiftly than many other unions in the United States.

So where does this all lead us? Fantasia and Voss perceptively point out that “Both examples are indicative of an emergent social movement that appears capable of dismantling powerful social barriers” (p. 172). And once these barriers are dismantled, groups with completely different long-term goals can nevertheless come together to fight for the same thing, joining hands and heads in the name of justice. Unlike most unions and strikes involving people from the same trade and the same class, movements like these allow much more widely dispersed skills and information to come into play―something that does not exist at the workplace but is desperately needed in a labor union. The concept is very simple and optimistic: once a social barrier is struck down and people can intermingle, they can accomplish unfathomable victories. The conclusion, therefore is that the more social barriers we break down, the farther we can advance as a nation in not only social justice, but technology, economy, and peace.

Bibliography

Fantasia, Rick. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement. University of California Press, Berkeley: 2004..

Gourevitch, Alex. “Awakening the Giant: How the Living Wage Movement Revived Progressive Politics.”

“A Brief History of the Living Wage Debate at Harvard.”                                                  < http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/timeline.html>

Lapin, Lisa. “Better pay, benefits for food service employees under new agreement.” Sept. 17, 2007. < http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=9695>

Robertson, Kathy. “UC Davis to hire Sodexho food-service employees.” Sacramento Business Journal. Thursday, April 17, 2008.
< http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2008/04/14/daily56.html>

“Food worker employment.” The Aggie. Apr. 24, 2008. < http://theaggie.org/article/479>

Kelly-Sneed, Caitlin. “University to employ food-service workers.” The Aggie. Apr. 21, 2008. < http://theaggie.org/article/421>

“Harvard Living Wage Campaign.”
< http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/timeline.html>

Heterosexist Hollywood: A Study of Its Effect on the Public

Film is one of the most widespread forms of entertainment in the world, and not surprisingly, it affects how people view the world very significantly. Although everybody knows that film is most commonly fictionalized, there are still aspects of it that affect people’s opinions on almost subconscious levels. For example, if no film ever showed women being in charge of men, people would start to believe that this is how the real world works as well and take this sexist viewpoint out of the cinemas and into their daily lives. Homosexuality is one such issue in film. It is still a hot debate topic today, and in the past it has been completely banned by censors. Has there been any homosexual influence on Hollywood in the past century of filmmaking? And conversely, how has Hollywood influenced the population’s perception of this issue?

Unlike what many people have come to believe, homosexual connotations and actual queer themes have been present in film since its very beginning. At the earliest stages in Film history in the beginning of the twentieth century, people’s views of homosexuality were completely different than what they are today. It was the general opinion of the public that homosexuality is linked to gender identity, and that the reason for the same sex attraction had its roots in a supposed desire to be of the other sex. Harry Benshoff summarizes in Queer Images that “homosexual men supposedly wanted to be women and homosexual women wanted to be men.” (21) For example, it was not considered strange or wrong for two men to dance with each other or even kiss, as long as they still looked masculine. The online article “Homosexuality in Hollywood” explains that “One of the earliest surviving motion picture images is a primitive test made at Thomas Edison’s studio, in which two men dance together while a third plays the fiddle.” (1) People believed that it only became “perverted” if there was gender-switching, such as a man wearing a dress.

This ignorance to see the connotations of the general public and the powers responsible for production of film created a kind of innocent era of filming where it was neither illegal nor condemnable to film homosexuality, since all film was still in a kind of experimental stage at that point. Benshoff notes that this innocence was then easily taken advantage of by directors such as “Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) [which] make[s] homosexuality surprisingly overt. … Roman emperor Nero fits easily into the pansy stereotype … [while] Empress Poppaea demands that one of her female friends disrobes and shares her bath.” In fact, there were even positive responses. “Homosexuality in Hollywood” remarks that “a woman dressed like a man—like Marlene Dietrich in ‘Morocco’ (1930)—the audience loves and thinks that is sexy.” (1)

However, this innocence was not long-lived. The United States was still a deeply religious nation and its ethics and morals stated that homosexuality is an abomination and will not be tolerated. The article “Homosexuality in Film” explains that “powerful forces were already at work. Religious and women’s groups had been protesting the movies’ permissiveness throughout the twenties and thirties, lobbying for federal censorship of the movies.” (2) Although the federal government didn’t respond to these pleas, the film producers themselves tried to create censorship guidelines, such as the Hayes Code. Joseph Boggs connects the issue in The Art of Watching Films when he writes that “Hays and his staff first reacted to state and local censorship by codifying the most frequent objections to film content and advising member companies on what to avoid.” (514) The Hays code, along with suppressing many other aspects of film, tried to ultimately scour any reference to homosexuality, or as it said, “sexual perversion” from motion picture.

Even though the success of these measures was not absolute, it had very saddening long-standing consequences. It tried to purge all images of “sexual perversion”, especially positive ones, but at the same time it was impossible to exclude all references to gay subculture in film, because all types of culture naturally make their way into film. The film Celluloid Closet explains that “For all its efforts, the Production Code didn’t erase homosexuals from the screen—it just made them harder to find. And now they had a new identity: as cold-blooded villains.” (Scene 7) Film, one of the most influencial communications media in the public at the time, was telling America that homosexuals are heartless and insane, and this message was taken in by straight and gay folk alike. Homosexuals began to be more afraid than ever to accept themselves for who they were because they believed that would mean that they would become murderous maniacs that try to force others to be gay as well. This was actually one of many stereotypes Hollywood imposed on minorities during this period to try to belittle them and single them out. In fact, many of these villified homosexuals were women ending up behind bars or in cages like animals. The Celluloid Closet explains that “These women were a warning to ladies, to just watch it and get back to the kitchen, where God meant them to be.”

On the other hand, Benshoff reveals that

“Queer images did not completely disappear after 1934 … Often, because Code officials were lacking any understanding of the era’s queer subcultures, they missed more subtle instances. For example, while Code administrators were ever watchful to censor the word pansy from proposed film scripts, the newer use of the word gay seems to have slipped through on occasion.” (30)

This is a very crucial point, because it emphasizes the capability of the culture to persevere in the face of adverse suppression. “Homosexuality in Hollywood” states that “Hollywood had learned to write movies between the lines, and some members of the audience had learned to watch them that way.” (2) The fact that it was possible to sneak in gay references even when they were actively being “scoured” from cinema served as a model for future hope of gay rights movements, the first glint of  hope amidst extreme hatred and prejudice.

In addition to this, foreign film industries had started letting down their own boundaries, creating competition for Production Code Hollywood. “Homosexuality in Film” recounts that “a film came out of Great Britain in which an explicitly gay (or at least bisexual) character actually stands up to fight the system that oppresses homosexuals.” (4) Because of this, Hollywood filmmakers tried to attract their own audiences with more adult themes, and eventually they had circumvented most of the code. Even though this was not a victory for gay rights in film directly, it was a step that began reverting all of the ignorance and hate that America had shrouded itself in during the Code era.

Then, after the Second World War, something strange began to happen. After this catastrophic war, people realized that not everything might be as it should be in America and many people started to voice their opinions. All kinds of minorities began to gain more rights, like African-Americans and women. But, at the same time, the subject of homosexuality seemed to go even further into the closet. Benshoff writes, “Male homosexuality was especially egregious to a nation obsessed with its own masculinity (or potential lack thereof). Homosexuals were branded ‘sex murderers’ in the press, a sort of human plague that was threatening to destroy the very foundations of society.” (87)  This mindset stayed with Hollywood well past the World War into the sixties with producers and other officials choosing to ignore the gay liberation movement that was gaining prominence so quickly.

However, this period did not last forever, and finally began to subside after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, in which the members of a gay bar called Stonewall chose to resist yet another in a long series of raids by the New York Police Force on queer establishments. The riots reached national level of popularity and kicked off a cascade of events granting queers many rights they had not had previously. Fortunately, the film industry finally relized the cultural representation that Hollywood was trying to cling to was extremely outdated, and released two revolutionary films—The Killing of Sister Gorge and The Boys in the Band, both of which present homosexuality as a part of life for the characters along with the problems they must encounter because of it, rather than making the characters themselves and their queer identities problems of the plot. These two films were the prototype for the first gay feature fiction films that followed inevitably, but were not such themselves because in the end they did treat the subject of homosexuality as something negative and something that puts a dark stain on one’s life.

Queer Directors

The kind of homophobic attitude Hollywood had throughout the Production Code era and the Postwar era would make you think that every single movie director was a heterosexual homophobe. But this is a very transparent assumption, because in fact there were plenty of producers that tried to sneak in gay content into their movies.  According to the article “Film Directors” on www.glbtq.com, “It has sometimes been said that the lesbianism of Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) afforded her a certain license as ‘one of the boys’ in a fiercely male dominated profession,” and that she was “one of only two successful female directors in Hollywood's Golden Era.” Though she had many difficulties achieving this high rank, it cannot be debated that she was an extremely successful, and yet queer film director.

And even directors such as James Whale, who were unapologetically open about their sexuality, were still able to produce films under Hollywood’s name before their careers inevitably fell apart because of their notoriety. In fact, James Whale himself directed the highly regarded and yet overtly queer horror film Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

So a conclusion can be made from these facts: even while Hollywood thought they were scouring out all queer images from their exclusive industry, gay directors were almost proliferating in their backyard and infusing many of the most well-known movies with queer subtexts that undermined the entire philosophy. This counterbalancing of ideals provided a check on the power of Hollywood to influence the feelings of its audiences about homosexuality, and gave the queer movement more time to develop and settle into the picture.

Queer Actors

While directors control the film backstage, actors create what the audiences will see, and what else, if not this, influences an audience’s opinion? One of the most important queer actors of film is Rudolph Valentino. This man was the one and only male icon of his era of film (the silent era). According to the article “Valentino, Rudolph (1985-1926),” from the website www.glbtq.com, “His androgynous persona, at once assertively virile and gracefully sensitive, threatened traditional images of American masculinity in a crucial period of cultural change.”

Another important actor to mention is Clifton Webb whose career spanned the 40s and 50s. This actor, as the article “Webb, Clifton” from the same website states, “had the charisma and authority to single-handedly rescue the sissy from secondary roles; he is either the star or a major player in all of his films that followed.” This is crucial because the sissy—an effeminate male character—was one of the only representations of queers in Hollywood movies at the time, and certainly the most obvious. For gay audiences to see the sissy rise to leading roles was a very reassuring and hopeful change, albeit the fact that a sissy is still a sissy.

Conclusion

Throughoug the early and middle parts of the century, Hollywood, after realizing its undeniable presence, attempted to remove all queer references from its films. We have seen that the goal of these actions the hope that a lack of such ideas in film will have a direct consequences on the real world because film has such a big impact on viewers’ lives. We may be prone to believe that Hollywood succeeded in this heterosexist mission because of all the repression of queers that has been clearly present during this time period. However, upon more careful analysis, we find that this is not true, because where acknowledging the presence of homosexuality is concerned, the public has been and always will be ahead of the cinema. The fact that Hollywood’s officials chose to ignore the growing openness of the public for no less than twenty years did not affect this growth. What we must deduce from this goes back to the very fundamental concept of the entertainment industry—the purpose of which is to entertain the public. And the only way the public can be entertained is by displaying what the public wants to see or is used to seeing (and even that is stretching it). Therefore, it is impossible for Hollywood to be used as a tool for forcing the public to think a certain way unless the public itself chooses this path. It is not the producers that have tried to ban homosexuality from the screen, but rather the queer community that has succeeded in melting the strong stereotypes about it, one by one, to the point where soon Hollywood will portray people of all sexualities and gender identities in an unbiased, natural way.

Bibliography

Benshoff, Harry. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America.Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc. New York: 2006.

Boggs, Joseph. The Art of Watching Films. McGraw Hill. Boston: 2004.

Epstein, Rob. The Celluloid Closet (film). Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. 1996.

“Homosexuality in Film.” , 2007.

“Homosexuality in Hollywood.” 2004.

“Film Directors.” <>, glbtq, inc. 2002. 

Civics Final Paper

Picture this: it is 3 AM and you are sound asleep like any other night. You’ve worked hard all day like any other day trying to keep your family fed. Suddenly, pounding on the door wakes up you up. As soon as you open the door, a policeman grabs you, handcuffs you, muffles you and takes you away for no reason you can think of to a detainment chamber. You have no idea how long you will be forced to stay there, how you will be treated, if you can contact anyone, but more importantly, why you are there in the first place. Does this sound unfair and ridiculous? It does, and this does not happen often in the USA because Americans are protected against this by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment states that

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”[1]

This is a vital human right, because it helps maintain a restriction on the government that prevents it from freely invading people’s privacy—something done in socialism but not in democracy. As an activist, I believe that if I were living in a place where the effects of this amendment were not manifest in any form, I would be instantly subject to the ramifications of a ransacking of my house to find evidence that I am a dissenter from the views of the government. With the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, I feel that I have more liberty to express myself and fight for what I believe is justice (in addition to help from other amendments, like the First Amendment.). However, after working hard to create a more effective protection of privacy for citizens by making decisions in favour of the Fourth Amendment, the government has taken away much of the amendment’s power, and has been consistently and unconstitutionally ignoring its provisions.

The history of searches and seizures goes back hundreds of years. In fact, the first recorded case dates back as far as 1335 in a case involving counterfeit money. [2] The power of search and seizure continued to grow without inhibition by royal and parliamentary decree all the way until 1688, the Glorious Revolution. “William of Orange, the new monarch, persuaded Parliament to abolish one tax because the searches required for its enforcements were ‘a badge of slavery upon the whole people.’”[3]

One of the most despised manifestations of search and seizure was called a writ of assistance, which is a document issued by a judge that allows a law enforcement officer to basically ransack any place whenever he feels like it is necessary—at his own discretion. This was a perfect pathway to the abuse of this power, and officers would search people’s homes for made up reasons if they were offended by that person or any similar scenario. Even when England outlawed the use of these documents at home, they were still widely used in the Colonies to harass the Colonists.

An important turning point in American history with respect to this protection came from James Otis. The death of King George II automatically caused all writs of assistance to expire and caused them to have to be reissued under the new king. James Otis petitioned the Massachussetts government not to hand out these writs because of their severe encroachment into people’s privacy, which was supported and passed into law by the Massachussetts General Assembly.[4] The governor, however, who was loyal to the King, overturned this law, which was extremely unpopular with his subjects. This act is claimed by some to be the spark of the Revolution.[5] In fact, the Declaration of Independence mentions the harassment of the Colonists by the King as one of its grievances. The Fourth Amendment was created in order to protect the people of the new United States from a repeat of this.

Laws by Congress

Congress has passed two consecutive acts that severely cripple the freedoms granted by the Fourth Amendment. The first act is called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. After Nixon’s violation of the Fourth Amendment by spying on political and activist groups using federal money, much investigation was done into the legality of cases such as this. It was after this that Congress passed this act, which in effect legalised what Nixon did under the condition that the judicial and congressional branches are made aware of each such move in due course, meaning that if it threatened national security, the government didn’t have to declare the action until much later. In addition, this act changes the conditions needed to issue a warrant from the Fourth Amendment. While traditionally, warrants issued upon “probable cause” have had to be based on evidence that the person was comitting a criminal act, the FISA court can now issue a warrant if the US government can prove that the person they are asking a warrant for is merely affiliated with a foreign power.[6]

FISA and a few other acts are all detriments to the Fourth Amendment, but they maintain that information obtained by warrants granted in this way is not constitutionally acceptable to be used in criminal court cases. However, a bigger change came when Congress issued the PATRIOT Act. The act was hastily passed by Congress in response to 9/11 as a means of fighting terrorism, by lowering restrictions and protections on intelligence gathering. This enables law enforcement to search different electronic media like email and phone calls, and also makes it much easier for the government to detain people that it suspects are associated with terrorism. In addition, this act requires using evidence gathered in ways conflicting with the Fourth Amendment in criminal cases, unlike all the acts preceding it. The Patriot act all but completely dismantled the Fourth Amendment, because it creates a much lower standard for “unreasonable search and seizure”—many people would consider that an assumption of terrorist affiliations is an unreasonable cause to seize one’s property; and it creates easily navigable loopholes to avoid the need for obtaining a warrant to conduct these actions. These are the two provisions given by the Fourth Amendment, and they are both nearly nullified by the Patriot Act.

Executive Branch Policies

The Executive Branch has instituded many policies that are largely unknown to the general public which, among other egregious offenses, overtly violate the provisions of the Fourth Amendment. Called Covert Operations, these policies are the Executive Branch’s way of attempting to preserve national security with radical measures that it does not disclose to the other Branches of government until much later. Among operations that bring down the Fourth Amendment are ones such as MKULTRA, which centered around investigating mind control techniques to gain information about the enemy. This is an unlawful extortion of information that tries to directly invade personal security of an individual to extract the information. Not only are these operations unconstitutional, but just the fact that they are kept away from the public makes it clear that the government is scheming against the will of the people. If the government is supposed to represent what its people need and want, then everything the government does should be known and monitored.

Another project that undermines the Fourth Amendment is the Guantanamo Bay military base. This was established on the land of Haiti and never returned to its original owner. Now, it is used as a holding ground for detainees under the excuse that since it is not on US soil but still a US prefecture, neither the bill of rights, nor the Geneva Convention applies there. However, there are known cases of US Citizens that have been taken by force from their homes and families to this facility and detained for an arbitrarily long amount of time without any kinds of rights that are Constitutionally provided to all citizens.[7] Not even the USA PATRIOT Act is as blatant of a defiance of Fourth Amendment rights than this facility, which undermines the very foundations of the Constitution.

Supreme Court Cases

As we have so far seen, the US government seems to have a trend of wearing down Fourth Amendment restrictions. However, the Supreme Court, as its fundamental duty, is opposed to such avoidance of Constitutional law, which is clear through rulings it has made with regard to the Fourth Amendment.

In Chimel vs. California, a man was arrested, and then the officers entered his house. Ignoring the felon’s denial to “look around” the officers proceeded to thoroughly search his home, and find incriminating evidence. After the man sued for Fourth Amendment rights, the Supreme Court ruled that the arrest was valid because the police had an arrest warrant, but the evidence found in his house was taken unconstitutionally, since the officers had no search warrant to look through the suspect’s house. The Supreme Court then went on to define that it was only permissible for officers to search in the area immediately around the suspect after arrest, and not in his or her home.[8]

An important case of this is Mapp vs. Ohio, in which police officers, after a denial of entry by Mrs. Mapp to search her house for another suspect, broke into her house, handcuffed her to her bed, and searched the entire residence without a search warrant. They found some material that they decided was obscene, and arrested her. The Ohio state court upheld the arrest and gave Mrs. Mapp eight years in prison. However, the United States Supreme Court heard Mapp’s lawyer’s appeal four years later, and ruled that the evidence was found unconstitutionally. Then they also ruled that this kind of evidence cannot be used as legal evidence in State court cases, and not only federal court cases as was the previous rule.[9] This is a prime example of the Supreme Court trying to uphold the Constitution by making restrictions on the other branches, known as checks and balances, to prevent them from corrupting their power.

This important decision is actually upholding an earlier Supreme Court decision which introduced the exclusionary rule, in which evidence unlawfully seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is not permitted to beused as such against a defendant in a federal court of law. This ruling took another important step and enforced this protection for every possible criminal case.

Conclusion

Although the Supreme Court’s rulings are in favour of supporting the Fourth Amendment, it is not enough to protect the rights of US Citizens. The other two branches of government—Congress and the Executive Branch—are both allowing laws and policies to slip through that undermine this fundamental right. It is very alarming to see how little is being done about cases such as Guantanamo Bay, which are not only unconstitutional, but are basic human rights violations. It is imperative that the actions taken by the government to create encroachments on our rights such as this are reversed and properly punished, because  if it is not, then the United States is at great risk of losing progressively more and more of its restrictions that protect its people, and can turn into an imperialist dictatorship that claims to be waging a war on terror while ruling by means of terror itself. The Fourth Amendment was created to protect the people from the government, and the government must be forced to uphold this principle.

Bibliography

“Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969)”,

David, Andrew. Famous Supreme Court Cases. Learner Publications Company, Minneapolis: 1980. (50)

De la Pena, Nonny. Unconstitutional. (2004)

Lasson, Nelson B. (1937). The History and Development of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Johns Hopkins Press. 

Napolitano, Andrew. “Congress is Gutting the Fourth Amendment.” 2006

Newman, Robert K. The Constitution and Its Amendments. Macmillan Reference USA, New York: 1999.

"The Constitution of the United States," Amendment 4.

 

 

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[1] "The Constitution of the United States," Amendment 4.

[2] Newman, Robert K. The Constitution and Its Amendments. Macmillan Reference USA, New York: 1999.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lasson, Nelson B. (1937). The History and Development of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Johns Hopkins Press. 

[6] Napolitano, Andrew. “Congress is Gutting the Fourth Amendment.” 2006

[7] De la Pena, Nonny. Unconstitutional. (2004)

[8] “Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969)”,

[9] David, Andrew. Famous Supreme Court Cases. Learner Publications Company, Minneapolis: 1980. (50)