It used to be you had to drive through the “checkpoint.”
Soon, you’ll be driving it.
Part of the Biden Thing’s “infrastructure” edict includes a requirement that cars made beginning with the 2026 model year come standard with what amounts to what courts used to order sometimes be fitted to the cars of people convicted of drunk driving.
The italics are important.
It is no longer necessary in this country to have done something in order to be punished for it. This is just the latest example. Others include being treated as presumptively sick and ordered to wear a “mask” because you might be, endlessly.
No matter how obviously not-sick you are.
This was preceded by presumptive terrorism – i.e., everyone who travels by commercial airliner (but not, it is worth mentioning, private jet) is handled – literally – as if they actually had threatened to blow up an airliner.
Also on the theory that they might.
All of this was established as an actionable principle many decade ago – back in the 1980s – when the court that decrees what is and is not legally allowable irrespective of the plain meaning of the words of the law decreed it was no longe necessary to suspect someone of having done something – this hoary old notion in the law of probable cause – prior to subjecting them to an investigatory procedure.
As for example detaining people at “checkpoints” where they are obliged to show ID and satisfy a cop they are not “drunk,” without having given the cop the slightest reason to suspect them of being anything at all.
It was enough – said the court – that they were driving on government roads and had obtained a government-issued driver’s license, by which (said the court) they had given their implied consent to having their travel arbitrarily interrupted, be detained under duress (however “briefly,” as it if that mitigates the affront of it) and obliged to convince a cop they weren’t doing something he had no prior reason to suspect them of doing.
This “implied consent” business being a lot like a man who says a woman who agrees to go out to dinner with him has agreed to have sex with him afterward. It’s vicious nonsense, of course. But it is also the law – as regards these “checkpoints.”
And so it has followed, inevitably – as an elaboration of the principe already accepted (or at least, established in law) that it is ok for cops to stop drivers for no specific reason at all and treat them as presumptively “drunk” – that drivers will shortly be unable to go until their car has decided they are not “drunk.”
How will it decide? And what constitutes “drunk”?
