Balancing National Security and the Constitution: The Security Blanket Over Civil Liberties
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Date
2020-06-04
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
In a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1775, Franklin wrote, “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” While Franklin was addressing his concern with state taxation, his quote touches upon a broader issue that has plagued the country since the days of the founding fathers. This issue is the debate between balancing the government’s actions in national security and the subsequent suppression of certain civil liberties as a result of their actions. Scholars in the field of national defense and or Constitutional law have debated the government’s actions through historical and contemporary examples as right vs. wrong with regards to legality, morality, and ethicality. My thesis analyses these events and scholarly opinions while expanding upon this debate by adding a unique perspective as I look at historical and contemporary examples through a subjective lens of necessity. The objective of my thesis is to review statutes, Presidential actions and Court decisions to show how these institutions have attempted to balance civil liberties and national security. Each of these reviews is a chapter showing that, in general, priority is given to security. My thesis further expands upon this discussion by selecting critical national security events and applying a self-created necessary scale predicated upon three subjective variables that I believe are the crux of national security decision making: the severity of the threat to the country, the imminence of the threat, and the ability to counter the threat to each event. Taking much inspiration from Justice Robert Jackson’s three pronged test in the Youngstown v. Sawyer Supreme Court Case, the goal of the scale is to apply my own quantitative analysis to assess the government’s actions and the effects on the American citizens. While this scale is subjective in nature, it is meant to bring a different approach to the discussion. Through these means, I argue that balance between security and liberty is critical, however, this analysis finds that on balance the institutions of the United States side on the security of the nation over particular individual civil liberties.
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Constitution, Civil Liberties, Government, National Security,