I happened to be in New York City when the impeachment trial ended with Pres. Molesto's acquittal. There, the trial barely made a blip against the firestorm of publicity surrounding a Bronx shooting in which police, at close range and for no apparent reason, shot 41 times at an unarmed young African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, rendering him Swiss cheese. (Police say he fit the "profile" of a rapist wanted in the area, meaning he was a young black male.) Following numerous other incidents in the city, the Diallo shooting has galvanized opposition to police abuse and resulted in several large demonstrations.

But lost in the media circus, there as elsewhere, was a pair of stunning U.S. Supreme Court rulings last month that swing the door toward a police state as widely open as it's been in this country in a long time.

In the first, the court overturned itself and ruled the famous Miranda warnings--the requirement that suspects be advised of their rights before questioning--are no longer necessary. Police, apparently, can now be trusted not to lie in the course of interrogation. The Miranda decision came in the '60s as a result of exactly the sorts of abuses the Supreme Court now says are no big deal.

The second decision, less widely reported, has even broader and more troubling implications. For the last decade, the U.S. has slowly pushed through its courts a case in which it has attempted to deport seven Palestinians and a Kenyan woman in Southern California (the "L.A. Eight"), explicitly because of their political beliefs. The defendants have attempted to get the matter out of INS jurisdiction, where they essentially have no rights, and into U.S. District Court.

The Supreme Court, in rejecting the L.A. Eight's attempt to (for example) find out what the charges against them are, what the evidence is, and to be able to cross-examine it in court, went even further than the issues brought before it. The court essentially ruled that "selective enforcement" in deportation cases--enforcing the law capriciously, against the people you really just don't like--was a tool the government could use at will, with no obligation to explain why. The ruling effectively denies Bill of Rights protections (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so forth) to non- citizens, to whom the U.S. Constitution apparently does not apply. And it sets an ominous precedent of allowing an enforcement agency to target anyone it likes, for any reason, with no public scrutiny or hope of appeal.

The Clinton Administration, in the L.A. Eight case, spent over six years vigorously arguing for these expanded rights. That approach is consistent with Clinton's general record on civil liberties, which has been an unmitigated disaster for the Constitution. He's vastly expanded the federal gulag, stuffing it primarily with nonviolent drug offenders, many serving long mandatory sentences for piddling crimes. He's stripped habeas corpus rights for federal appellants. He's cut back legal assistance to the indigent. He's continued the (conservative) politicization of federal judgeship appointments. He's vastly expanded federal wiretap and surveillance powers. He's completely eliminated due process for (non-white) non-citizens, creating a climate of police state repression on our borders. He's acted against his own commission's recommendations in retaining racially discriminatory federal sentencing guidelines for cocaine possession. Most of all, Bill Clinton spent the last six years working hard to expand the Democratic political base (the Republicans were bad enough) for the presumption of guilty until proven innocent.

The final lesson, ironic in light of the Supreme Court's decisions, in Clinton's impeachment is that the judicial system is an ideological tool, to be wielded by whomever has the most power, and truth be damned. Which is exactly how Bill Clinton has used the judicial system over his entire career. He was impeached, a move wildly unpopular in much of the nation, by a special prosecutor with unlimited powers--the same sorts of powers inexorably being given courts, police, prosecutors, and prison systems across the country. It's never the Bill Clintons who pay the price. Ask Amadou Diallo.