Or even really dangerous, in the wrong hands.

For years, I’ve warned about the dangers of precedents; in laws, bureaucratic regulation, and judicial. My personal ball got rolling back inthe 1990s with the passage of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. CALEA was passed to “help” LE catch criminals, by making it easier to tap phone calls.

The Communications Assistance for law Enforcement Act (CALEA) is a statute enacted by Congress in 1994 to require that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have the necessary surveillance capabilities to comply with legal requests for information. CALEA is intended to preserve the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct electronic surveillance while protecting the privacy of information outside the scope of the investigation.

Sure. But it morphed into requiring the capability to monitor 10% of switch traffic at the same time; ten percent of all phones in the country. And remotely, so LE doesn’t even have to come to the switch office and physically tap a single line. It was expanded to include Internet traffic.

Then the PATRIOT Act to help catch terrorists.

What could possibly go wrong? Who could have foreseen that someone later would use those tools to monitor thousands of innocent Americans, or even spy on the opposition’s election campaign?

Well… “Who,” other than myself and thousands of other privacy advocates.

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave us a real doozy of a precedent: it just declared Donald Trump to be an “insurrectionist” ineligible to appear on the state primary ballot.

Love Trump or hate him (and I’m no great fan), the “reasoning” and “process” behind this decision is frightening; enough so that I’ll never travel to or through Colorado again.

The CO supreme court majority (there are three dissenters with some self-awareness) simply declared Trump to be guilty of insurrection. They deliberately and specifically denied the need for an actual charge of 18 U.S.C. § 2383 insurrection, a trial, evidence, or conviction. They specifically denied any requirement for Fifth Amendment due process. The accusation — in a civil case that Trump was not a party to — is all it takes for a life sentence of ineligibility to hold office or appear on a ballot.

Because Amendment 14, Section 3 is magically “self-executing.”

There is no Fifth Amendment in Colorado.

If this were to go to the US Supreme Court (and Trump says he’ll appeal), we might well learn there is no Fifth Amendment in the country.

But let’s look at the flip side of this insane precedent, under the almost-worst case scenario*:

Imagine down the road we end up with a hard-core right-wing administration; a Republican president perhaps, with as little respect for the whole Constitution as many current Republicans (don’t forget who saddled us with CALEA, PATRIOT, and bump-stock bans in the first place). Let’s say President Smith ran on a platform plank of doing something about the ATF, winning hearts and minds of American gun owners.

On the one hand, we have an agency whose specific job is to infringe on Second Amendment rights.

On the other hand, we have a precedent that says Constitutional amendments are automatically “self-executing,” and punishments for violation of the 2A don’t require indictment, trial, evidence, facing accusers, or defense. And one day, President Smith Tyrant simply send US Marshals to every ATF office in the country to round up every agent and employee, and drag their sorry asses off to the gulags, never to be heard from again.

Or… Federal Election Commission, meet the self-executing First Amendment.

You can probably think of one or two others that could use a dose of Constitutional self-execution.

So to speak.

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* The worst case scenario would be SCOTUS making this a national precedent with the current administration, which proceed to rape the country faster and harder than it already is.