Woman ordered by cops to quit praying gets some relief from Supreme Court

Like a stopped clock, maybe President Obama could be right twice a day – or, well, at least once in Kansas. In the town of Louisburg, police lived up to the Obama "stupid" epithet after they were called on a case of a radio playing Michael Savage's talk show reportedly too loudly. Instead of solving the problem by asking the mild-mannered lady of the house, Mary Anne Sause, a retired nurse, to turn the thing down, they managed to trample her First and Fourth Amendment rights, doing absurd things like busting into her home, telling her they didn't need a stinkin' Constitution, and commanding her to quit praying before they hauled her off to jail. Instead of apologizing for the brouhaha they caused, which Sause asked of the department for two years, they ignored her and assumed that their rotten behavior would just go away. Instead, she launched a lawsuit that prompted the Supreme Court to step in and put brakes on this kind of arrogant police behavior.

According to NBC News: WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a new round of hearings in the case of a Kansas woman who accused police officers of blocking her from praying in her own home. Sause and her legal team are claiming a victory from this, given that so many courts up until now have just thrown the case out. But it's pretty much a case of forcing the lower courts to go back and do their jobs, so in the long term, it could still go either way. That said, it puts a spotlight on unreasonable and arrogant police behavior, which oh, so easily could have been corrected, on both the loud radio and the apology, had these people had any decency or common sense. As NBC reports: In a unanimous, unsigned opinion issued Thursday, the Supreme Court said it needs to know more facts before it can evaluate what happened. Her lawsuit doesn't say, the court noted, "what, if anything, the offers wanted her to do at the time when she was allegedly told to stop praying." The court sent the case back to the lower courts to seek answers to those questions. Really amazing that the courts never found out how the cops proposed to solve the radio volume problem, if at all, and were oh, so willing to throw the whole thing out. It raises questions about whether the courts were buddy-buddy with the cops or some kind of cronies of theirs. It really is a basic constitutional issue now. According to KCUR: The case has both First and Fourth Amendment implications. That's because after Sause admitted the officers to her apartment – that's where Fourth Amendment principles governing search and seizure come in – they told her she was going to jail. She then asked one of the officers for permission to pray – that's where her First Amendment religious rights arise – which he granted. When she dropped to her knees and began to pray, however, the other officer mockingly ordered her to get up and stop praying. To anyone looking at this, it's clear that the woman has a case. People have the right to listen to Michael Savage on the radio in their own homes. They have a right to not be invaded by cops without a warrant, saying the Constitution is for little people. They have a right to pray in their own homes, especially if they haven't been arrested. And they most certainly have a right to an apology when those things are not done. Well, an apology was too much for these morons, so now they have the Supreme Court bearing down on them.