Police and military personnel (Henninger’s conflation: “police army,” is revealing―the shape of things to come?) going house to house without warrants, forcing residents out while they conduct searches, is the kind of scene partisan extremists envision when they object to the Patriot Act. If a drunk driver had caused an accident and killed a busload of children, then fled into a neighborhood, would the people of that neighborhood or the judicial system have tolerated a “search” similar to the one in Boston? Not if the Fourth Amendment still means anything. Ironically, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has been a proponent of Constitutional interpretation that looks to the “plain language” and the “original intent” of its framers.

Since 9/11, the phrase “war on terror” has invested the government’s pursuit of “terrorists” with the attributes of war, presumptively justifying curtailments of civil liberties. Nobody has answered the question: how can war be waged against a tactic? This vacuously inane concept has given the government virtual carte blanche. It now claims the right to use deadly force against anyone it deems a terrorist, in any foreign country, without either that country’s assent or domestic judicial review, in perpetuity, since terrorists will be with us seemingly forever. Only a filibuster by Senator Rand Paul finally brought a measure of assurance that the government would not conduct drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. We’ll see how that stands up.