Say goodbye to the Fourth Amendment

In Washington, D.C., your Congress finished its destruction of your rights as citizens under the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution. Without warrants, and without your knowledge, the phone companies, the Internet servers and all other telecom service providers can spy on your videos, phone calls and text messages.

Just by our president telling our electronic media firms to spy on us, it will happen. There is nothing we can legally do in court to stop it. Communications with your doctor, lawyer, financial adviser, even a writer who might disagree with the government, could get us in trouble.

Every one cares about their rights under the Second Amendment.

Our legislators are afraid to vote to slow the ownership of guns. Just let a legislator try to propose laws that might have common-sense positions about gun ownership and the roar of the NRA scares the vote right out of them.

Today, speaking with a group of seniors, even they did not understand the vote about the Fourth Amendment, but they did understand their rights under the Second Amendment.

Only a student from Simpson College, in Iowa, understood the double standard our political parties have set up whereby if you want to run as an independent for any office you must get at least 5 percent of the total vote of the last election, not the small percentage of your party. This young lady also understood the loss of our protections of the now almost useless Fourth Amendment. Even Barack Obama broke his promise to vote for the protections afforded under the constitution. We can only hope that the new generations of voters will not be afraid to change politicians who do not vote for common sense laws and those politicians who undermine the protections afforded us by our founding fathers. These men understood that administrations do not always have our citizens' best interests at heart.

Ernie Ebner

Elgin