Alex Pretti
was in the crowd
protesting the enforcement
surge and carrying
a legally permitted gun
when U.S. Border Patrol agents
shot him dead.
What lessons are we
as a nation
learning from all of this?
Over the course of years
and decades
in a really bipartisan way
let me be clear about that
we have given prosecutors
far, far more leeway
to game the system
and abuse the law
than we had realized.
We have relaxed and reduced
sometimes
through the actions and rulings
of the U.S. Supreme Court
sometimes through statutes
and sometimes through
political practice
we have relaxed and reduced
protections
of constitutional rights
where the First Amendment
Second Amendment
Fourth Amendment
or Fifth Amendment
all of which are
implicated in the
shooting of Alex Pretti
by the way.
We relax those protections
in the interest of making
the executive branch
more powerful
of making police
more powerful
and making prosecutors
more powerful.
In the past
it's always been the case
and maybe it's still the case
but as long as it was
the other side politically
that was suffering
we would say, 'Oh, well
that's fine with us.'
What we continue to
seem to be unable
to recognize as a nation
is that
we all need these protections
because just because
your side
is abusing the system now
doesn't mean the other side
won't abuse it later.
It's just this basic
fundamental notion
of limited government
under a constitution.
And in the case of criminal
and in the area
of criminal prosecution
those guardrails have slipped
dramatically.