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Op-Ed

Nakedly Unconstitutional

October 29, 2018

You’d think the Internet and fake news and fake fake news (i.e. real news that people call fake) and bots with opinions are all confusing enough these days. But now there’s another insidiously misleading trend to watch out for: groups that act like they’re on one side but are really on the other.

Milt Policzer

By Milt Policzer

Courthouse News columnist; racehorse owner and breeder; one of those guys who always got picked last.

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You’d think the Internet and fake news and fake fake news (i.e. real news that people call fake) and bots with opinions are all confusing enough these days. But now there’s another insidiously misleading trend to watch out for: groups that act like they’re on one side but are really on the other.

Life in the U.S. is turning into a weird game of misdirection.

Note the following headline on a press release issued last week: “NCLA Sues City of Coral Gables, Florida, Calling Its Use of Automated License Plate Readers ‘Nakedly Unconstitutional.’”

At this point, you should be wondering about quite a few things. My first question, naturally, was how do you get nakedly unconstitutional? Can you get nakedly constitutional? Must you be dressed when reading the Constitution?

There was no clue as to what that phrase meant in the press release so, naturally, I turned to a search engine. This yielded 25,600 results. The best part was this:

From what I can tell, it’s mostly Republicans and traffic monitoring devices that are nakedly unconstitutional. This didn’t help explaining what it meant. So, naturally, I searched for “nakedly unconstitutional definition.” That gave me explanations for unconstitutional but not the naked part.

The closest I got was an item headlined: “Constitutional Decisions by a Bare Majority of the Court.” That, of course, doesn’t help because, obviously, it refers to naked judges, not nude constitutionality.

I suppose the concept must remain a mystery for now so let’s get on to my next question: What horribly invasive thing has the City of Coral Gables done to its residents? According to the press release, it’s “the collection and storage of sensitive license plate information.”

I have to admit to being surprised to learn that there is sensitive information on my license plate. I’ve gone out to stare at it since reading about this and I still haven’t found the sensitive information. Maybe it’s in code.

The government — at least in Coral Gables — now possesses that information from our personal license plates that we made ourselves. No wait, we didn’t. I seem to remember the plates came from a “department” having something to do with motor vehicles. Surely, that department didn’t keep any records of what’s on those plates.

Hmm.

Well, surely the NCLA is only looking out for our rights as citizens. After all, it’s called the New Civil Liberties Alliance — not to be confused with the American Civil Liberties Union, but you know someone will confuse it anyway.

What is the NCLA, which is not the ACLU? You can decide for yourself by looking at its website but it sure looks like a group of white conservatives crusading against the great evil plaguing American society — administrative law.

You may not have realized how awful administrative law is but the Alliance is here to expose it — in all its constitutional nakedness.

Beware of regulatory agency porn sites.

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