The First Congress of the United States, in the heady days of 1789, faced a critical challenge: How could they guarantee that the young American government would protect the hard-won liberty, earned in the Revolutionary War years earlier, of the American people? Many had cried foul during the Constitutional ratification process, fearing that the government created under it would fail to respect the people’s freedom and fall into tyranny. Representative James Madison, who had been a leading figure in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, sought to placate them by improving the Constitution “in the opinion of those who are opposed to it, without weakening its frame.” Madison thus created a system of checks on the government’s power to ensure that it would respect individual liberties. This system was embodied by the Bill of Rights, a series of ten amendments to the Constitution establishing a vast range of inviolable rights enjoyed by the American populace. The document, ratified that year, has long served to defend Americans from intrusive encroachment upon rights and …show more content…
These programs allow law enforcement officials to seize criminals’ money and resources to pay for police expenditures, and can thus serve as a valuable tool if used justly against criminals. But as police departments, starved of funding, use the program to essentially rob people never convicted of a crime, it transforms from a useful mechanism into a gross assault on the Bill of Rights. An egregious example is the police force of Tenaha, Texas, who made $3 million over two years by taking money or property from drivers, most of whom had committed no crime. Madison would be sickened to see police actively contravene the right, established in the Fourth Amendment, “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” in the name of the public