In many of his books, Thomas Sowell criticizes how the Warren court's rulings on criminal justice allegedly led to a great spike in crime. For example, the requirement to give Miranda warnings or to provide people who cannot afford a lawyer one free of charge.
While Sowell claims that these rulings had no basis in the Constitution, which may well be the case, I'd like to discuss the substance of the matter.
Given the persecution being faced by Derek Chauvin, Donald Trump and the January 6 protesters, I wonder if the Warren court protects the rights of defendants enough, because it does not seem to be doing much to protect people's rights.
The government can spend tens of millions of dollars 'investigating' you, frivolously indict you, and if you manage to beat the charges, you have bankruptcy to show for your pains. Because if you have been a responsible citizen and saved money, you won't count as impecunious and the government isn't going to pay for an ineffective lawyer for you. So you lose all your money as well as years of your life being dragged through a court.
Basically, they can destroy a man de facto if not de iure, and that only if they do not manage to find a sympathetic judge and jury.
Counterarguments could be of course, to point out in Sowellian style that more rights for criminal defendants is not a 'solution', but merely a trade-off. While you hedge against tyranny and make fewer innocent people go to jail, you also further undermine the ability of the government to prosecute legitimate criminals who terrorize neighborhoods.
The whole idea of (American) republicanism is to set up such a system that bad men would do good for the country. It does not speak well if things have evolved to such a point that you desperately need good people to be in positions of power, because you're never, ever going to get "good" people.
I'll have to challenge some of your points. I agree that they try to evade the law as much as they can. But they are not disappearing people off the streets (yet?). Is it because of the law, or is it because society has evolved to such a point as to not tolerate it?
And even though they violate the Second Amendment on the margins, do you doubt that they would love to abolish it in its entirety? But they haven't, because they haven't been able to do that. Why? Is it because of the law, or is it because America has so many gun owners to make that impractical? Remember that we in Europe have zero gun rights, and while I'm not pro-gun compared to people here, I am appalled by Europeans who make derogatory, ill-informed comments about Americans having guns. Our constitutions generally provide zero protections, because they all have 'exception' clauses that allow the government to violate them basically whenever they want. And they're easy to modify anyway. So is it true that law, in this case the constitution which is the highest law, has afforded you no protections? If not 'no protection', it's not being ignored entirely, but rather evaded as much as they can. How can we prevent them from doing it - assuming that the most evil people imaginable will be in office, as they always are?
I'm not sure myself what the 'correct' answer to these questions is. But whatever it is, it will provide clues as to how you can resist a regime bent on becoming as tyrannical as it can be.
The 2nd amendment is difficult to repeal because it's part of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was framed with the deliberate intent that it should be difficult to make deep and wide sweeping alterations without a vast majority of representatives within the government body agreeing to the changes.
Obviously though, there's not exactly much that the constitution could've included to account for an elite class that goes ahead, almost totally ignoring any rule of law, and doing whatever the fuck they want without any penalty.
The judicial system SHOULD be doing something to hold government officials accountable, but they're "almost" as pozzed (or toothless) as the other government bodies in the US, with a few notable exceptions who've still managed to provide at least some deterrent to illegal leftist actions.
Because it's "evolved" to become something that it wasn't set up to be. That evolution was helped along by both good and bad people. It's the nature of the state.
That, and the government was—despite the Enlightenment-era optimism of its founders—designed for a particular people at a particular time. It worked for a country whose people were Christian, who primarily came from the British Isles, and who were largely predisposed to self-governance and independence. We today—almost a quarter of a millennium later—are none of these.
So... the old fall of empire?