Ron Paul Quotes
September 11th does not justify ignoring the Constitution by creating broad new federal police powers. The rule of law is worthless if we ignore it whenever crises occur.
Paul, Ron. "Is America Becoming a Police State?" United States House of Representatives, 25 June 2002. Congressional Record.
This was written during the George W. Bush Administration where the reaction to 9-11 was to curtail some civil rights and constitutional protections in favor of more national security. Bush was not the only President who eroded civil rights in a fear for National Security. FDR interned the Japanese Americans. Woodrow Wilson jailed pacifists who protested against the draft. John Adams passed the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts.
The major phrase was first used in a dissent by Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson in 1949 {633526} and later by Chief Justice Earl Warren {601702}
In a 1949 dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago Jackson claimed the majority view would “convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
The choice is usually contrasted between guilty persons going free, rather an innocent one be adjudicated guilty. But here the justice tells us that the avoidance of an innocent person being subject to easy arrest is important enough to have a system where guilty people sometimes escape justice.
Ronald Ernest Paul is an American author, physician, and retired politician who served as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 22nd congressional district from 1976 to 1977 and again from 1979 to 1985, and for Texas's 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. On three occasions, he sought the presidency of the United States: as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and as a candidate for the Republican Party in 2008 and 2012. A self-described constitutionalist, Paul is a critic of the federal government's fiscal policies, especially the existence of the Federal Reserve and the tax policy, as well as the military–industrial complex, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. He has also been a vocal critic of mass surveillance policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance programs. He was the first chairman of the conservative PAC Citizens for a Sound Economy, a free-market group focused on limited government, and has been characterized as the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement, a fiscally conservative political movement that is largely against most matters of interventionism.
