SUPREME COURT SAYS WELFARE RECIPIENTS DON'T HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

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NY TIMES EDITORIAL - This week, the Supreme Court let stand a disturbing
ruling out of California that allows law enforcement to barge into
people's homes without a warrant. The case has not prompted much
outrage, perhaps because the people whose privacy is being invaded are
welfare recipients, but it is a serious setback for the privacy rights
of all Americans.

San Diego County's district attorney has a program called Project 100%
that is intended to reduce welfare fraud. Applicants for welfare
benefits are visited by law enforcement agents, who show up unannounced
and examine the family's home, including the insides of cabinets and
closets. Applicants who refuse to let the agents in are generally denied
benefits.

The program does not meet the standards set out by the Fourth Amendment.
For a search to be reasonable, there generally must be some kind of
individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. These searches are done in the
homes of people who have merely applied for welfare and have done
nothing to arouse suspicion.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San
Francisco, rejected a challenge brought by welfare recipients. In ruling
that the program does not violate the Constitution, the majority made
the bizarre assertion that the home visits are not "searches."

The Supreme Court has long held that when the government intrudes on a
person's reasonable expectation of privacy, it is a search for purposes
of the Fourth Amendment. It is a fun-house mirrors version of
constitutional analysis for a court to say that government agents are
not conducting a search when they show up unannounced in a person's home
and rifle through her bedroom dresser.

Judge Harry Pregerson, writing for himself and six other Ninth Circuit
judges who voted to reconsider the case, got it right. The majority
decision upholding Project 100%, Judge Pregerson wrote, "strikes an
unprecedented blow at the core of Fourth Amendment protections." These
dissenters rightly dismissed the majority's assertion that the home
visits were voluntary, noting that welfare applicants were not told they
could withhold consent, and that they risked dire consequences if they
resisted.

The dissenting judges called the case "an assault on the poor," which it
is. It would be a mistake, however, to take consolation in the fact that
only poor people's privacy rights were at stake. When the government is
allowed to show up unannounced without a warrant and search people's
homes, it is bad news for all of us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/opinion/28wed2.html?ref=opinion

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