Via Roy Edroso, some rambling thoughts from Jonah Goldberg at The Corner on the Exclusionary Rule.  Mr. Goldberg thinks that we should allow the police to do pretty much anything they want as long as the goal is to protect the innocent.  He would eliminate the exclusionary rule and give the police the discretion to search anyone they like.  Jonah Goldberg believes we should allow state agents to enter your home any time they like, whether they can show you have committed a crime or not–it is enough that a twenty-year-old sheriff’s deputy thinks your kid might be smoking pot.  This may sound right to the simple minded, but deeper thinkers quickly realize that this is a crucial building block for a police state.

Of course, this argument comes from the man who thinks liberals are fascist for wanting to force companies to tell you what they put in the food they sell, but conservatives who want to ban gambling and strip clubs are only trying to preserve traditional American values.

Mr. Goldberg needs to re-read his Madison.  If he does, he will learn that James and the guys wrote the Constitution because they understood that men are not angels (see Federalis 51).  This applies to the police and Jonah Goldberg, who should have no power to determine who possesses the right to protection from intrusive government.  Our founding document, after all, protects everyone from unlawful search of private property by agents of the state–not just those the police (or Jonah Goldberg) consider innocent.

They did this because they tired of the state sending its agents to roust them out of their homes to harass and intimidate.  They did this to reduce the power of the state’s agents, real human beings with real resentments and crazy notions and not angels at all.  Madison and his colleagues wanted fellow citizens to determine innocence, not the police.

Of course, eliminating the exclusionary rule would not mean that the police could simply haul anyone they pleased off to the slammer.  But it nevertheless moves us a step closer to a police state by making arbitrary searches painless for those state agents who have bones to pick or pet theories to chase.  Remember that the exclusionary rule is not limited to urban police looking for drugs and guns in the bad part of town.  It also keeps agents of all types from fishing for embarrasing details about the lives of political opponents or business rivals.  Support for such an expansion of state power is an interesting position for conservatives to take.

I suppose they have to, since making Americans afraid of boogeymen like criminals and terrorists is about all they have left after the catastrophic failure of their economic, military, and foreign policies.  Besides, Jonah Goldberg is a no-talent hack hired by his mother to analyze politics and policy without letting facts get in the way.  That his political philosophy lacks cohesion should surprise no one.