Originally Posted by Casimir
Please show me where, in the Constitution or by Supreme Court precedent, there is a constitutional "right" to airplane travel, interstate or instate.
You will search in vain. If such travel has not been declared a "right" under the constitution, it is a privilege and it may be regulated. You have NO RIGHT to insist that you be given access to an airplane, except under the contract you have with the airline, which is subject to the government's security regulations.
The Supreme Court long ago declared interstate travel a constitutional right, subject like all such rights to regulation. Free speech, for example, is subject to reasonable time place and manner restrictions. I don't know about the parade of horribles scenario you posit, but it is clearly constitutional for the government to ask a series of questions before letting someone on a plane.
You are correct that whether the government may do it and whether it's a good idea are two separate questions. I am not addressing the latter point. I don't care much what other people's opinions are on that point on an internet bulletin board, even one as good as this one. I DO care when people (not you) misrepresent the law and assert yet another "right" that doesn't exist.
Where in the Constitution does it say that an American has a right to sexual activity without having it filmed by the government and distributed on the internet regardless of their desires? According to the same rationale as laid out above, the government has a right to do that too. Pretty? Not. Or is your kind of rationale one that the newly appointed SC justices would go along with?
Would that make you happy? It wouldn't me; but then again, it's not I who presume the government has rights to all that is undeclared in the Constitution.
I tend to think that those powers specifically assigned, in the Constitution, to the government -- and no more -- are within its sphere. And everything else is within the sphere of each and every individual American citizen.
I'm not going to be a subject. I'm a citizen.
If someone else wants a police state -- and likes being a state subject -- North Korea will make them a good home. I hear they like interrogations ... including before and after travel.