Judge rules warrantless camera dragnet may be unconstitutional, bill fixing it sat waiting one month

…(cont) Page two: a bill, the Flock-Off Act, filed by Representative Thomas Massie exactly one month earlier, September 3. It would block federal funds from being used to purchase, install, maintain, operate or upgrade automated license-plate readers or biometric surveillance cameras for municipalities and local law enforcement.

The planner sets the two pages one month apart on the bench and does the arithmetic out loud: a bill that answers a constitutional problem, filed thirty days before a federal judge put the problem into a written ruling. The bill didn't predict the case. It didn't need to. The dragnet was already running; Massie's bill just named the machine a judge would later call, in writing, a possible constitutional violation.

The tinkerer picks up the Flock-Off Act and turns it over for parts. The working piece is the money: the bill doesn't prohibit a camera, it shuts off the federal dollars that buy, install, run and upgrade one. A municipality that wants a Flock reader after this bill passes has to find a budget line that isn't federal. That's the whole mechanism — not a ban, a drought.

The muscle goes looking for the bill's status and finds one line in the record: unveiled, introduced, sitting in committee. The record doesn't say who's hearing it, who's blocking it, or what happens next. That's not a clear hallway with the door standing open — that's a closed door with no sign on it, and the receipts don't say what's behind it.

The pilot runs the numbers one more time. A federal judge just wrote down, in a ruling, what the bill's text already assumed: that a government camera reading every plate on every street without a warrant is the kind of surveillance a reasonable person doesn't expect to live under. That doesn't make the bill law. The committee hasn't voted on it, the floor hasn't seen it, and whether the fix works is a question only a vote can answer — not a judge, not a crew, not this column. What the bench can say is narrower: the tool existed, cataloged, filed, dated, sitting in a committee, a full month before the court got around to describing the hole it was built to patch. The crew doesn't predict the vote. The crew just logs the date it could have happened and the date it didn't.