"Sonia Sotomayor's opinion Monday in the Supreme Court's Utah v. Strieff ruling was a masterpiece." [View all]

[mia]

It will be widely and deservedly quoted for years for its deep understanding of why Fourth Amendment violations matter. Unfortunately, her opinion was a dissenting one, in part because Stephen Breyer, a fellow Democratic nominee, doesn't really get the Fourth Amendment....

Rewarding the police for illegal, suspicionless searches of people doing nothing wrong is also contrary to the basic individual privacy and equal citizenship the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment are supposed to guarantee. As Sotomayor puts it, the Court's holding "implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged."

Sotomayor's argument is unanswerable, and while it's not a surprise to see the Court's Republican nominees ignore such concerns, it's appalling for Breyer to join them. It's not as if Breyer is unmindful of the issues Sotomayor raises, or has a generally bad record on civil rights issues. His dissent in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District is a brilliant, powerful demonstration of how formally equal legal language can conceal and reinforce racial hierarchies. But for whatever reason, he has a blind spot from applying this kind of analysis to some Fourth Amendment cases.

Sotomayor's dissent should be a landmark that helps set the liberal constitutional agenda should Hillary Clinton win and produce the first Democratic-majority Supreme Court in more than 40 years by filling Antonin Scalia's vacant seat. And one person who Clinton should not nominate for Scalia's seat is Merrick Garland. Obama's lame duck nominee looks too much like another Breyer on civil liberties issues. Senate Democrats should quietly help to ensure that Garland's nomination dies in the Senate after the election. And if Clinton needs inspiration for a pick, she could do a lot worse than looking to Sotomayor.