SUPREME COURT NARROWS PRIVACY'S REALM

The U.S. Supreme Court justices in a recent ruling seemed shocked, shocked
that Iowa police had got it into their heads they could search any drivers
and cars they pulled over for routine traffic violations. But the court
needed only to look at its own rulings in recent years to see where the
idea came from that privacy claims have little standing against the claims
of law enforcement convenience.

The court's record of indifference to privacy issues is not perfect, but it
leans heavily against any but the most narrow and literal readings of the
Constitution's Fourth Amendment guarantees. The court has been winking for
years at supposedly forbidden "unreasonable searches and seizures" that
violate the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects."

Indeed, the justices needed to refer back only a few weeks to their ruling
that guests in your home don't enjoy the protection that you do from
warrantless police searches. Perhaps overnight guests would, some justices
said, but not day visitors, a distinction notable mainly for its
arbitrariness. Your home may still be your castle, but it could become a
dungeon for drop-ins.

As the court became more conservative with Presidents Reagan's and Bush's
appointees -- a condition little changed by President Clinton's two -- it
came to favor the power of the state over the liberty of individuals. (An
odd tack for conservatism, one would think, but there you are.)

In 1986 the justices held that governments can outlaw and punish even the
homebound, consensual exercise of sex acts a legislative majority chooses
to proscribe. It would be difficult to imagine a more intrusive extension
of police power.

The court has been increasingly indulgent of forced drug tests in schools
and workplaces even when no drug use is suspected. It has shrugged off
schoolhouse strip-searches of students. In an Ohio case, the court endorsed
the search of the car of a driver arrested for speeding -- an obvious
precursor to the Iowa law that permitted such searches for any traffic stop.

That broad grant of police power finally was too much for the court. It
meant anyone driving in Iowa was subject to a search for criminal evidence
at any officer's whim. All that was required was an officer's willingness
to write a ticket charging the driver with fudging a red light, creeping
through a stop sign, beating the speed limit by a few miles. Officers
could, in practice, stop and search motorists for spite, sport or just
because they didn't like a driver's looks.

The latest ruling gives only feeble cause for encouragement. Its unanimity
shows that the justices do, at the extreme, have some sort of gag reflex
against privacy violations, but the justices made only a very fine
distinction, one between searching drivers "arrested" for a traffic
violation (OK) and merely ticketed (not OK).

The justices show no inclination to rethink their burdening body of
decisions that have steadily narrowed the zones and conditions in which
Americans can reasonably expect to be shielded from the rummaging
intrusions of a nosey state.

Tom Teepen is national correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He can be reached
by e-mail at teepencolumn@coxnews.com.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski