HOUMA — A state district court judge insisted that if the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended for free speech to be preserved, they would have placed the First Amendment within a system of protective levees.

Judge Randall Bethancourt made his observation Tuesday outside the Terrebonne Parish Courthouse, where reporters asked him why he refused to invalidate a search warrant he signed that was used to seize all computers and cellphones in the home of a Houma police officer suspected of anonymously publishing an investigative blog.

Attorneys for Officer Wayne Anderson — who has been suspended from his job despite not being charged with a crime — argued in Bethancourt’s courtroom Friday that large portions of the state defamation law used to authorize the warrant had been declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Everybody here in Terrebonne Parish knows that’s how you keep things from being eroded away.”

The judge was unmoved and maintained the Constitution doesn’t protect “peons” like Anderson who “talk shit” about public officials and question their business dealings.

“I’m tired of all these damn eggheads trying to tell me the Constitution does this, and the Founding Fathers meant that, and people’s constitutional rights are being eroded,” Bethancourt said. “Well, if the founders wanted to protect free speech, they’d have put it inside levees. Everybody here in Terrebonne Parish knows that’s how you keep things from being eroded away.”

When a reporter asked if the same argument applies to the Second Amendment, Bethancourt ordered him to be thrown in jail indefinitely for “asking such a stupid question.”