The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

A lawsuit ensued, and it made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1971, where the nation’s top justices asked the question: Does the Fourth Amendment apply to people on welfare? Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority, explained that it didn’t. The state, Blackmun wrote, “has appropriate and paramount interest and concern in seeing and assuring that the intended and proper objects of that tax-produced assistance are the ones who benefit from the aid it dispenses.” He added that “surely it is not unreasonable … that the State have at its command a gentle means … of achieving that assurance.”