LP Wins Round

WASHINGTON, DC----''A victory for the Bill of Rights and a defeat for the War on Drugs''----that's how the Libertarian Party characterized last week's 8-to-1 Supreme Court decision that declared unconstitutional a Georgia state law mandating drug tests for political candidates.

''This decision is a small step towards sanity in a nation that is rapidly being stripped of its basic civil liberties,'' said the party's national director, Perry Willis.

The case was especially important to Libertarians because the plaintiff, Walker Chandler, challenged the Georgia law after he ran for lieutenant governor as a Libertarian Party candidate in 1994----starting a three-year legal odyssey that led him all the way to the nation's highest court.

Today, a jubilant Chandler said, ''It's a wonderful day when the Supreme Court puts limitations on the excesses of government.''

The case of Chandler v. Miller has its origins in 1990, when Georgia passed a one-of-a-kind law requiring all candidates for state office----governor, attorney general, state representatives, and so on----to submit a urine sample that tested negative for drugs before being allowed on the ballot.

Under protest, Chandler took and passed the drug test, won more than 47,000 votes as the Libertarian candidate for lieutenant governor in the 1994 election, and filed a lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of the law. He started off with two defeats, losing in district court and in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But he didn't give up. After the Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal, Chandler argued his own case before the high court on January 14, 1996, basing his arguments on the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against ''unreasonable'' searches.

''Surely there are some limits to suspicionless drug testing,'' said Chandler. ''This case may be an opportunity for the Court to delineate just what those limits might be.''

It was. The court, in a lopsided 8-to-1 decision, ruled that the Georgia law was in violation of the Fourth Amendment because candidate drug testing ''does not fit within the closely guarded category of constitutionally permissible suspicionless searches.''

''However well-meant, the candidate drug test Georgia has devised diminishes personal privacy for a symbol's sake. The Fourth Amendment shields society against that state action,'' wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the majority decision, which was joined by seven other justices. Only Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented.

But does this decision mean that voters have no way to stop drug addicts from running for public office?

Of course not, said Willis. ''All this decision does is return power to the voters. If voters are genuinely concerned about drug-impaired candidates, they can simply threaten to withhold their votes from any candidate who doesn't pass a drug test. Voters have far more power than any state law----they have the power of the ballot box,'' he said.

Chandler v. Miller represented not only the Libertarian Party's first victory before the Supreme Court, but also the first time the nation's highest court had agreed to hear a case filed by the party. From 1975 to 1996, the high court had rejected 15 appeals from the party, all relating to ballot access and election fairness laws.

----from LPHQ