Montana Viewpoint: Respect and the rule of law

Jim Elliott

If you want the people to respect their government, the government needs to respect the people.

Over the centuries people have worked to write rules that protected a person’s life, liberty, and property. When the earliest mining camps began in Montana, they developed principles on how to protect each other’s claims. Pure and simple self-interest made it important to have rules, and if a rule was to be effective it had to apply to everybody, not just the strongest, so the purpose of creating laws went from protecting only self-interest to protecting mutual interests.

Just as there had to be rules to protect people’s lives and property, there had to be rules to protect a person accused of violating those rules, because, after all, accusers sometimes lie. Thus began the rights of the accused which spell out procedures that the powers that be must follow.

We wrote the United States Constitution to establish how our government would work, and then we added to it the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights—to lay out what the government was not allowed to do. This was done to protect the individual from an over-bearing government. It was thought necessary because of the examples of government overreach by the King of England, George the Third.

For example, the King prohibited anyone from criticizing him, so we wrote in freedom of speech and the Press in the first Amendment.

Before we freed ourselves from English tyranny, Americans were often taken into custody without knowing the reason why, so we wrote the Fourth Amendment on Search and Seizure:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Most importantly, those Constitutional protections apply to anyone and everyone who is physically within the United States of America and her territories regardless of citizenship or legal residency status.

So, it’s a two-way street; the citizen has to have respect for the law and the officers who enforce it, and the officers have to have respect for the citizen and the rights of the citizen. For the most part that has worked well…up until now.

It’s still working well on the local level, but federal law enforcement agencies seem to feel that they are exceptions to the rule. They pull surprise raids on unsuspecting people without a warrant and without identifying themselves. In the process of capturing illegal aliens, they injure and traumatize the innocent citizen bystander. This illegal behavior is condoned, supported, and defended by their superiors. Effective or not, it is nothing but thuggery.

In Chicago on September 30, 2025, hundreds of Federal agents conducted a raid on a five-story, 130-unit apartment building. Helicopters landed agents on the roof while other agents stormed the ground entrances. Sleeping residents, including American citizens, had their doors bashed in, were subjected to flash-bang grenades, handcuffed and led from the building where they were placed in busses for over an hour before they were released. A reader of this column likened it to the infamous Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas in 1993. Thirty-seven illegal immigrants were taken into custody while the rest of the occupants were merely traumatized.

Allowing the federal government to ignore the rule of law breeds disrespect for authority. It is not the way to enforce the laws.