More conservatives like this, please!

An interesting interview with New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano. Napolitano is a staunch advocate of procedural checks on government, especially in areas of law enforcement.

Some excerpts:

Reason: What’s your case against the USA PATRIOT Act?

Napolitano: Let’s put aside all of the procedural problems with enacting it. Forget about the fact that there was no debate. Forget about the fact that most members of Congress didn’t even have an opportunity to read it. It is a direct assault on at least three amendments to the Constitution: the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment. The PATRIOT Act legitimates the notion that if we give up certain freedoms, the government will keep us safer. I reject that notion from a moral and legal point of view. I also reject it from a practical point of view. It doesn’t work. The government doesn’t need our freedoms to keep us safer. No one—no lawyer, judge, or historian—can point to a single incident in American history where national security was impaired because someone insisted on their right to free speech or their right to privacy or their right to due process.

[…]

Reason: Let’s talk about the evolution of your views. During your college years in the late ’60s, you wore a “Bomb Hanoi” T-shirt and supported Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign. You write that eight years on the bench as a superior court judge in New Jersey turned you into a “born-again individualist,” and Fox News Channel viewers can see you regularly argue in favor of restrictions on cops and law enforcement more generally. How did serving on the bench change you?

Napolitano: I had a realization that many [law enforcement agents] were lying. Some of them would acknowledge, not to the extent that I would have them charged with perjury, but in the wink and the nod in a conversation with them afterwards, “Well, we almost don’t care if you found out that we kicked in the taillight.” “We knew,” they’d suggest, “from the profile—Mercedes Benz, New York plates, African-American driver, coming off the George Washington Bridge—it was more likely than not that drugs were in there, and we don’t even care.” They took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they’re violating that oath when they violate the rights of the driver of that car.

I’ve always considered myself a Barry Goldwater Republican. I want the Democrats out of my pocketbook, and I want the Republicans out of my bedroom. I believe that the Constitution and the natural law mandate that the individual is greater than the state and that individual rights are the whole reason for our success in the Western world. Our cultural successes, our enjoyment of freedom, our financial successes, are all due to unleashing individual initiative and guarding and protecting individual liberty.

[…]

Reason: How do you feel about Alberto Gonzales as attorney general?

Napolitano: He will be the first attorney general in American history, publicly, to be in favor of torture. The others may have been in favor of it privately, but Al Gonzales is in favor of it publicly. This is an untenable position to take.

[…]

Reason: What’s the connection between your Catholicism and your politics? The church contributed hugely to the development of natural law theory. But historically, the church has also often been an extremely repressive, anti-democratic, anti-individualistic organization.

Napolitano: The Catholic Church teaches that every human life is of potentially infinite value, that it can be saved up to the moment of death, and that each soul could present everlasting and eternal glory to God, no matter how evil the person appears. That’s about as strong a statement of the primacy of the individual over the state as you could imagine.