In The Supreme Court is suspicious. By Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate, she discussed the case I referenced below in my post about a national ID card. The case was heard by the court today:

One after another dismisses the national ID card debate as not at issue here. One after another suggests—and to a rather frightening degree, at times—that this case has nothing to do with innocent people, or ordinary people. This case has to do with “suspicious” people, and—as you were no doubt aware—suspicious people are not like you or me.

[…]

We all seem to want to live in the world inhabited by most of the justices: where our names are private, and no one needs to incriminate themselves—unless some policeman decides they are suspicious. Then, there is a duty, a responsibility, a constitution-negating requirement that you come forward—to use Scalia’s formulation—and cooperate. This idea that the “suspicious people” (read: dark-skinned, poor, urban etc.) have some heightened duty to cooperate with the police is utterly backward, in light of the police’s historical treatment of them. It’s a shame Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t speak today. One can imagine that he has at least some idea of what it means to hold “suspicious” people to a different constitutional standard.

Read the whole thing. Somehow I’m getting the idea that the court is in the process of abandoning legal principle generally in favor of some sort of “common sense” view of the law that says the government can do what it wants because an innocent person has nothing to worry about.