The men who wrote the Fourth Amendment had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued. They had lived under writs of assistance — general warrants that let a customs officer search any house, any ship, any person, on no suspicion at all. So they wrote a sentence meant to settle the matter for good: 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 warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It was a line no administration could cross, but the history of...

There is a line in the Fourth Amendment that was supposed to settle this. 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 warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It is not a suggestion. It does not contain an exception for emergencies, for terrorism, for immigration, or for your own good. It was written by men who had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued, and who meant to draw a line that no administration could cross no matter how frightened the...

The U.S. government is waging an illegal, congressionally unauthorized war on Iran. Thirteen American soldiers are formally confirmed dead at the time of writing. Over $11 billion of your money has been spent in three weeks. And the primary concern of senior administration officials is that television stations are using the wrong headlines. On March 13, Pete Hegseth—the former Fox News host who renamed the Defense Department and whose theology holds that God is personally invested in U.S. airpower over Tehran—stood in front of the Pentagon press corps and delivered a media workshop. A...