Tom Keane

Playing political games

Summer’s upon us, and election season is just around the corner. Time for some political games! Here are a few of my favorites.

Marco Rubio. Best enjoyed in the ocean waters off Florida or along the Rio Grande, most gameplayers are would-be immigrants attempting to avoid capture by another player named “ICE.” ICE calls out “Marco!” and the others must answer “Rubio!” Using the sound of their voices, ICE tries to find the immigrants. When he does, though, there’s a twist: A successful capture can involve imprisonment, deportation, or — if a certain senator is in the mood — a warm welcome to a new country!

Kick the Can. Players are usually politicians trying to avoid hard budgetary choices. Funding pension obligations requires cutting spending today? Kick the can! Tax increases needed to reduce the deficit? Kick the can! After many rounds, players are usually so exhausted they go home, leaving another group of players to come on the field where sometimes they find that there’s no more can to kick! Hey, no fair!

Monopoly. This Massachusetts-based game has been going on a while, and the Democratic team is already far ahead. But look here! Someone wants to raise a challenge! Can the GOP team possibly wrest away veto power from legislative Democrats? Can it win a few statewide offices? Might it even get the governorship? No, no, and a very slim possibility yes. Once a monopolist, always a monopolist.

Capture the Flag. A quadrennial spectator sport, fans bet on which of a small group of players will capture the Democratic and Republican flags, thereby entitling them to run against each other for president. Gameplay features hundreds of debates, attack ads, and numerous unhealthy meals of fried chicken. 2016’s version promises much the same excitement as — wait a second! — the Democrats are saying they won’t play, that someone already has captured the flag. How can that be?!

Marty, May I? For years known as “Tommy, May I?,” this retitled game features a host of players seeking permission to develop buildings, run businesses, or otherwise get something done in the city. “Marty, May I . . . open a bar?” asks one supplicant. “Marty, May I . . . get a zoning variance?” begs another. Sometimes Marty says yes, sometimes Marty says no — and you’ll never know why! If turned down, you can always try again. But next time, you might want to hire some new lawyers, become buddies with local unions, or, best of all, get to know Marty’s neighbors in Dorchester. He always listens to them!

Musical Chairs. Every two years, Massachusetts’ senators and representatives play this nerve-wracking game as they to try to keep their seats. Gameplay involves gathering signatures, holding fundraisers, door-knocking, shaking hands, and then turning out the vote. Players, voters, and onlookers spend election eve biting their nails, wondering about how it all ends. But when they wake up the next morning — surprise — it’s the same old people in the same old chairs!

Chutes and Ladders. This old game has always been a crowd pleaser, with many, many players. Some go up the ladder of success, others slide down the chute to failure. But now there’s a revised version and, oh boy, it’s much tougher. Wow, those new ladders are really steep. And who are those people already at the top? They weren’t there before. Oh no, someone pushed you onto a chute and you’ve slid down! But don’t worry. There’s always another ladder around so that you can climb back up — no wait, there aren’t any to be found. Those folks at the top have taken them all away!

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on May 27, 2014.

Driverless cars: Closer than they appear

It’s Saturday afternoon but traffic on 93 South is at a crawl. Finally, the cause of our misery is revealed: a minor accident on the northbound side of the highway. Our delay has been due to curiosity, every driver slowing down to take a look — me, too, of course. If Google had its way, I think, this never would have happened. Machines don’t rubberneck.

The Internet giant has just announced that it has tested autonomous cars — cars without a driver — for more than 700,000 miles on city and suburban roadways. What was once a novelty seems suddenly probable. And if Google’s dream comes to pass, what we’ll get won’t merely be some incremental improvements such as safer, speedier trips, but potentially a revolution, one almost as significant as that wrought by the invention of the automobile itself.

The technology seems wondrous but is eminently practicable. Cameras and sensors are mounted on a vehicle. Matched with detailed maps, a comprehensive driving database and a sophisticated electronic brain, the otherwise conventional automobiles navigate streets better than any human.

Google’s not alone in this experiment. Others such as General Motors and Toyota are working on their own versions of autonomous cars. You won’t be able to buy the cars this year but this isn’t a 100-year fantasy either. Five, perhaps ten years from now will see them coming to market.

At first, they’ll be just like ordinary cars, with drivers able to switch from manual to autonomous as easily as going into cruise control. As the new vehicles become more accepted by regulators and the public, however, interesting things will begin to occur. For one, manual driving will become increasingly rare, in the same way automatic transmission replaced the manual clutch. Eventually, people will be able to “drive” without being trained as drivers at all. Your 12-year-old needs to go to basketball practice? Put her in the car, and off she goes. Mom and dad as chauffeurs will be a thing of the past. At some point, in fact, one can see states prohibiting people from driving at all. The autonomous cars will simply be that much better.

Lives will be saved. More than 30,000 die on American roads each year, millions more are injured. Nearly every crash is due to some sort of human error. So too, traffic jams will largely disappear. Humans overreact to brake lights in front of them. Driverless cars won’t. In cases of congestion, the cars — all of them communicating with each other — will plot out alternative routes.

With accidents rare, the need for bulky safety features will disappear. No more seatbelts or airbags. The interiors of cars will be reconfigured, looking like offices or game rooms. They’ll have room for standing and walking about.

New businesses will be created; others will disappear. Mass transit will change fundamentally. Automated buses might be available on demand, or perhaps the new business model will be a cross between Uber and Zipcar. Rather than owning cars, urbanites will just call for a vehicle. One will be dispatched from some nearby location, pick them up, take them where wanted, and then go away. GEICO’s gecko and Progressive’s Flo will be obsolete, body shops will disappear, and we’ll have no need for taxi-, bus- or designated-drivers. Massachusetts may even allow the happy hour to return!

The original car produced a mobile society, making it possible for people to live far away from where they worked. With faster, smoother commutes and time in the car now productive (rather than spent paying attention to the road), people will be even less constrained by travel concerns and distance in choosing where to make their homes. Commuters into cities won’t worry about parking; their cars will drive away to some remote location until needed for the ride home. Some perhaps will become true nomads, living their lives in far more sophisticated versions of Winnebagos.

There will be losses as well. There’s a romance to driving, a thrill to getting behind the wheel and seemingly being master of one’s destiny. In this new world, if we want to drive automobiles ourselves, there doubtless will be off-road locations where we can try our hand. Otherwise, though, the car will be in control.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on May 25, 2014.

Race and (re)vision in today’s America

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling tells a friend he would rather not have black people showing up at his games. Thousands of Bruins fans send angry, racist tweets after their team is beaten by the Montreal Canadiens. An elected official in Wolfeboro, N.H., calls the president the n-word.

Which matters more: the words or the response? The response, in all three cases, was fierce and unforgiving.

Sterling’s remarks were the talk of the nation, greeted with seemingly universal opprobrium and finally (finally!) supplanting coverage of the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The NBA commissioner moved rapidly, fining Sterling $2.5 million, banning him for life from the league, and vowing to force a sale of the team.

Less than a week after the Sterling story broke, Boston put on its own ugly show. P.K. Subban is a relative rarity in pro hockey: He’s black. One of the game’s more talented players, he led Montreal to victory over Boston in Game 1 of the second round of the playoffs, prompting furious Boston fans to unleash a torrent of raw, unprintable invective on Twitter. The Bruins were firm in their response, calling the tweets “racist, classless views” and their propagators “an ignorant group of individuals.”

And then just last week, Robert Copeland, a police commissioner in Wolfeboro, found himself in the hot seat for using the aforementioned racist epithet to describe Barack Obama.

“For this, I do not apologize — he meets and exceeds my criteria for such,” Copeland said. But the town manager labeled Copeland’s words “reprehensible,” calls mounted for him to leave (including one from Mitt Romney), and the inevitable happened: On Monday, Copeland resigned.

One could easily conclude from these three examples that America is still a pretty racist country.

However, an alternative, more optimistic, view is that they actually demonstrate the opposite: that we are in some nirvana-like post-racial world. Granted, runs that thinking, there are still racists out there, still people who say vile things. But as Sterling, the Bruins fans, and Copeland have discovered, those who utter them are considered far outside civilized norms, their language greeted with immediate condemnation.

That’s all to the good. There’s no question that overt racism is now largely unacceptable. Sterling and Copeland, who are both in their 80s, seem like throwbacks, men whom the civil rights era passed by. Meanwhile, though the racism from Bruins fans shows some people will still indulge in bigotry if they can do so under cover of the Internet, their comments triggered a fierce counter-reaction of pro-Subban rebukes.

The chorus of condemnation of racism is encouraging, certainly. Yet the view that it signals we’ve arrived in post-racial America misses the bigger picture: Something is still terribly wrong in the relationships between whites and blacks. The two races live their lives in almost separate worlds. Most American neighborhoods are still largely homogeneous. Some of that may be due to intentional bigotry, but much is also unconscious, a matter of people seeking out their own. Whatever the cause, however, those housing patterns end up affecting everything, from education to friendships to romantic relationships to work.

“Today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech,” Michelle Obama recently observed. The impacts on blacks are overwhelmingly negative. A few examples: The unemployment rate for blacks is consistently about double that of whites. Median household income for blacks is 40 percent below that of whites. Blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to be poor, while black men are six times more likely to be in prison than white men. A significant achievement gap between black and white students plagues the low-performing for the rest of their lives.

There are bright spots, of course. The educational gaps between black and white have been narrowing. Ten percent of all marriages are now interracial, a new high. These speak to the prospect that one day there really may be an America where race doesn’t matter.

But today, still, it matters far too much.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on May 20, 2014.

Afraid of words

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me,” runs the nursery rhyme, a sentiment that undergirds the idea of free speech. If you don’t like what someone is saying, wrote Justice Louis Brandeis, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” But enforced silence, it seems, is increasingly the remedy today.

A group at Harvard wants to put on a black mass? Deny them space and bully them into retreat. College commencement speeches featuring the head of the International Monetary Fund, a former secretary of state, or a one-time chancellor at the University of California at Berkeley? No, no, and no. Mentions of God in public meetings or the Pledge of Allegiance? Courts say OK, but the chatterati are appalled.

Each of these cases seems far different from the next. But there is a common thread that ties them together: We seem to be afraid of words.

Black masses, I gather, are intended as a mocking parody of Catholicism’s traditional celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. A student group thought it had secured on-campus space to put on such an event, but when the news got out a firestorm erupted. Suddenly the space was no longer available, and if the black mass was held at all, it was in secret at a Chinese restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue.

But why the over-the-top reaction to a black mass? No one seriously believed that a so-called satanic ritual was actually going to unleash evil upon the world. It was a piece of theater, doubtless intended to be provocative. The target was religion, but religion has been subject to mockery before (as many of the religious know too well), and there’s no reason to believe a Mass itself is somehow off-limits.

To their credit, some local Catholics responded with a Eucharistic procession, which was the right thing to do: Meet speech with speech. Harvard’s response was not right, however. Granted, the university is not the government and so is not bound by the First Amendment. But it should be bound to certain core values that define this nation; rather than championing those values, it seemed to abandon them.

Harvard’s not alone. Springtime brings commencements and the prospect of listening to droning speeches exhorting graduates to seize the day, cherish life’s riches, and remember to keep current on their student loans. This year what’s interesting isn’t who is speaking, but who is not. A number of possibilities provoked controversy: There was upset at Rutgers about Condoleezza Rice and the Iraq War, chagrin at Smith with past offenses by the International Monetary Fund, and disapproval at Haverford over how the University of California handled Occupy protestors. And so, invitations were withdrawn, and speakers bowed out. The message, apparently, is that we only want to hear from those with whom we utterly agree.

The same theme appears to be playing out with those who go to court any time they happen to hear the word “God” on public property. Two residents sued Greece, N.Y., because town meetings opened with a prayer. They lost narrowly at the Supreme Court. So, too, a family from Acton sued because they objected to “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. They too lost in state court. One can legitimately debate the results of each decision. But, still, what puzzles is the why of these lawsuits in the first place. The offense was inconsequential. A prayer to open a meeting or the words “under God” in the pledge hardly amount to the government establishing a religion. No one is compelled to participate, nor was it credible to believe that either the prayers or the pledge would somehow convert a person from one religion to another (or from being an atheist to a deist).

Don’t get me wrong. The students attempting to put on the black mass came off as a bunch of jerks. I’m not necessarily a fan of Condoleezza Rice and the other potential commencement speakers. And if I had been sitting on the state or US court, I probably would have ruled the other way. But none of these is worth the upset they created. Perhaps what we need are thicker skins and more open minds.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on May 18, 2014.

A letter to Mark Fisher from the Democratic Party

Dear Mark,

A small confession: When I heard some guy named Mark Fisher was going to try to take on Charlie Baker, my first thought was, “Marisa DeFranco.” You may remember the 2012 Democratic Senate primary, when we thought we had cleared the field for Elizabeth Warren. Then up popped DeFranco, who refused to get the message and, with every media outlet singing her praises, actually started to believe she had some traction. No way. Convention day arrived and — boom! — the poor woman never saw it coming.

We took a huge hit for it, though, with Republicans and others hammering us for strong-arming the race and being undemocratic. And so as I watched you beginning to mount a campaign, I started to think a little turn-about might be a good thing. A quick jab from you to their holier-han-thou ribs, if you will.

But Mark, truly, you’ve exceeded my wildest expectations. Jab in the ribs? How about a full-on thrashing?

We knew, naturally, that when the Republicans held their convention in March they wouldn’t let you on the ballot. Still, we here at MassDems were pulling for you. Imagine if he got on, we thought. Rather than attacking us for the next six months, Charlie would be defending his flanks. And we need him to be distracted. After all, we have our own ridiculous primary. Sure, it’ll be easy enough for us to apply our DeFranco playbook to Joe Avellone, Don Berwick, and Juliette Kayyem, but Steve Grossman has enough juice that he’ll probably get on the ballot. Seriously, Mark, why can’t these people just fall in line and take their turns?

But I digress.

So you lost, a fraction short of the magic 15 percent. Oh well, we thought, nice try.

But instead of rolling over, you sued! You claimed the Republican Party had secretly conspired to keep you off the ballot (and let me assure you, as one who’s done it on the other side of the aisle: they had). You began to subpoena documents! You got the party so freaked out about this that they caved, agreeing to let you on the ballot anyway — which you then refused! Instead — and this was brilliant — you told them you wanted a million dollars for your efforts! You even Richard Nixon-ed Charlie Baker, asking ominously, “What did Charlie Baker know and when did he know it?”

This is great stuff, Mark. Internal squabbles, backroom dealings, the stink of corruption, and Baker looking like he’s lost control. I mean, if Charlie can’t ride herd over a bunch of elephants, how can he expect to manage a zoo like Massachusetts?

In any event, thanks to last week’s ruling by a Superior Court judge, it now appears you’re on the ballot and you’re still able to go after the Republicans for money and those secret papers. While you’re at it, here are a few suggestions for other things you might want to push in Charlie’s face.

First of all, hammer him on the Big Dig. I know, all he did was help figure out the financing for what was, in truth, a Democratic project. But people only seem to get mad at the guy who hands them the bill — and that was Baker. Second, when Charlie ran last time around, he tried to go right-wing on us, growling angrily about spending, welfare, and immigrants. Now he’s just playing Mr. Nice Guy. Push him on this, Mark! Show voters his true-red stripes. And finally, keep talking about this Tea Party thing. Remind everyone that this is what today’s Republican Party is all about. Don’t let Baker get away with this big-tent, middle-of-the-road nonsense.

Thanks to you, Mark, I think it’s a lock for us this November. And please know how much we appreciate your efforts. Perhaps your manufacturing business might need a loan or some state contracts? Just drop us a line. Or maybe you’ve got a few shiftless family members looking for gainful employment? We can help. Not Probation, of course (ha!), but there are still lots of state agencies where the number one job qualification is that we just give the word.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping you make Charlie’s summer the hottest he’s ever had!

With much gratitude,

Your friends at MassDems

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on May 13, 2014.

The numbers are in: Menino was a great mayor

Politics is fun: the clash of candidates in campaigns, the pageantry of speeches and ribbon-cuttings, and the gossip about who did what to whom. Governance, on the other hand, can be dull: Few get excited about the back-office world of spreadsheets and green eyeshades, of non-recurring revenue, balanced budgets, bond ratings, and pension obligations.

Boring or not, though, this is the stuff that really matters. If you want to measure a city politician’s real success, look at the numbers — and by that measure, former Boston mayor Tom Menino’s tenure shines as an example for his successor, a point driven home by a just-issued report from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, the independent business-funded watchdog.

Covering the last 11 years of the administration, the report is both an excavation of the past — including an effort to understand how Boston survived so remarkably well the Great Recession — and a set of guidelines for the future. The short answers: Don’t reach farther than your grasp. Don’t be afraid to say no. And build up reserves to help ride out the inevitable next recession.

Boston’s government today is a $2.6 billion operation. More than 80 percent of those funds come from just two sources: property tax and state aid. Both are inflexible. State law prohibits cities and towns from suddenly increasing property tax rates. Meanwhile, state aid is shrinking. Boston’s share, for example, went from $523 million in 2002 down to $403 million last year. Money, in other The numbers are in: Menino was a great mayorwords, is tight.

So what are pols with grand plans to do? Play games. They can use non-recurring revenues (say from the sale of some city-owned property) to fund recurring expenses. They can increase borrowing, using debt to pay for constituent-pleasing new projects. They can underfund some obligations, deferring payments on employee pensions, for example. Or they can spend every last dollar, never building up a reserve. All of these dodges work, at least for the short term, but they create enormous perils for the future. Eventually, of course, someone has to pay.

Menino resisted those games. As the Bureau notes, during Menino’s tenure there was a general tendency to match recurring revenues with recurring expenditures. City policy was to keep debt service at no more than 7 percent of operating expenses; during tough times Boston would slow down borrowing for new projects. And when it created its annual budgets, it estimated revenues conservatively, meaning that expenses were also held in check. If revenues came in higher than expected — and often they did — they would be held in reserve, building up a rainy day fund. Indeed, the city’s discipline was such that bond rating agencies twice over the last decade increased its rating, meaning it could borrow more cheaply (which meant, as well, that it could actually spend those saved dollars on real projects rather than sending them to a bank). And the administration was disciplined as well in terms of managing pension liabilities; it’s on track to have them fully funded by 2025.

That’s not to say things were perfect. Personnel account for two-thirds of Boston’s spending. Although the number of employees declined by about 1,000 since 2002, city departments could have benefited from tougher scrutiny and wholesale review of their activities. In addition, the administration shied away from technologies (such as voicemail) and strategies (such as competing out services to private bidders) that could have saved even more. Union contract negotiations, particularly with the city’s teachers’ union, were chances to seek reforms — but ones Menino rarely seized. All of these are opportunities a Walsh administration should embrace.

Shortcomings notwithstanding however, the overall conclusion is that Menino did remarkably well by Boston. The puzzle is why. The greatest political pressure politicians face is to spend more, and it’s easy to give in, kicking the can down the road, figuring the problems they’re creating will be someone else’s to solve. Menino, I suspect, hoped from the first that he’d be mayor for a long while, meaning any problems he created would also be problems he’d have to solve — hardly a winning formula for success. It’s an important lesson for Marty Walsh: Even if he only plans to be around for four years, he should act as if he’ll be mayor for 20.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on May 11, 2014.

‘Local’ shouldn’t be the only relevant line on a resume

"Boston jobs for Boston residents!” is a perennial rallying cry, and Boston city councilors have — yet again — jumped into the fray. This time, councilors want to impose tough new residency requirements on those who would be cops or firefighters, not allowing them to be considered unless they have lived in the city for at least three years. (Right now the rule is just one year.) Politicians love this stuff; it’s red meat for constituents who think City Hall is Santa Claus and want the goodies for themselves. That’s why when Councilor Michael Flaherty came up with the idea, seven others immediately signed on. Me too! Me too!

But what is a feel-good proposal for some comes with little benefit and genuine cost. Taxpayers and those who expect a top-notch public safety force are cheated. Moreover, Boston is diminished, appearing a provincial, inward-turning burg that can never quite get used to the notion that it should be the region’s core rather than just another political jurisdiction fighting over scraps.

If Flaherty’s legislation passes, which is likely, it’ll become part of a web of residency regulations that over the years have tried, with varying success, to limit city jobs to city residents. There are a variety of rationales for the rules. Some worry about the flight from the city of middle-class families with kids. Others simply view them as a jobs program. And then there are those who argue residency requirements make for more dedicated workers and, perhaps, even a more diverse workforce.

None of those arguments hold much water. Yes, compelling workers to live in Boston might keep in a few who otherwise would live elsewhere. But if city pols really care about Boston’s residential character, they should address the real reasons families move out: the suburbs offer superior schools and cheaper housing. Similarly, if the councilors care about jobs, they should focus on the reasons people are unemployed or underemployed. A strong economy helps, of course, but the basic problem many city residents face is that they don’t have the skills employers seek. Again, that’s an issue with the schools.

It’s hard as well to give much credence to the notion that city residency translates to a more devoted and committed workforce. Despite the city’s existing residency requirements, most workers are exempt (usually due to union agreements) with no evident sign that those living elsewhere are less effective in their jobs. And residency rules make for a convoluted path to diversity. A better approach is to directly seek candidates who are, say, women, fluent in Haitian Creole, and so on.

And then there are the downsides. By trying to give city residents a legal edge over those from elsewhere, Flaherty’s legislation is in effect saying that those city residents couldn’t get the job on merit alone — that the outsiders have more talent and skills. I’ll grant that there may be some city jobs where we don’t necessarily hire the best person for the job (the position of city councilor comes to mind . . .), but certainly that shouldn’t be the case for public safety positions. Boston taxpayers have a right to expect that their money is being spent to hire the finest available.

Boston often struggles with its place in the world, worrying that it’s just a small town even as it seeks to be a significant regional — and even national — economic, cultural, and intellectual force. Harvard University would be a no-account backwater if it insisted on hiring only professors who come from Cambridge. So too, embracing Boston’s potential as a world-class city means having a world-class workforce, no matter where they’re from, no matter where they live.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on May 6, 2014.

Captain America, step aside: Justices are on the case

The United States Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments over whether police should get warrants to search people’s smartphones. A number of justices were openly skeptical when the government claimed none were needed. Perhaps they’d all just seen the latest release of Captain America.

Popular media reflects and informs our lives, telling us about our fears and aspirations. That’s true even of entertainments that seem entirely escapist, including those based on Marvel comic books. The movie isn’t high art — too many 3D fights, shootings, and explosions for it to be that — but it deals with a theme of much relevance today: the conflict between security and freedom.

In the film, a secretive organization with a massive surveillance operation plans to send aloft a trio of really big drones, armed to the teeth and ready to kill about 20 million potential troublemakers. Many on-screen seem to think this sensible. After all, what’s 20 million so the rest of humanity can live in peace?

Tracing his origins back to World War II and steeped in that era’s values of liberty and privacy, Captain America disagrees. He persuades a few other brave souls to help him thwart the scheme and the parallels to current events are obvious. There’s even a Julian Assange-like moment where one of the superheroes uploads the organization’s secrets to the Internet, available for all to see. (There are differences too, of course; the Assange character on screen happens to be played by the far more fetching Scarlett Johansson.) By the end, and after enough property damage to make an insurance executive cry, the superheroes have saved the day.

In the real world, who are our superheroes? People such as Assange or Edward Snowden seem candidates but actually are more akin to prophets, warning of misfortune but without the authority to stop it. Our elected officials? Some perhaps, but not those now in power. Indeed, it is the Obama administration — the same one that has so greatly stepped up the use of drones — that supports searching smartphones without warrants. We’re left with an improbable bunch: the nine justices of the Supreme Court.

On the plus side, they do wear superhero-style costumes, albeit flowing black robes that probably would be a hindrance during the acrobatics moviemakers now pass off as fighting. On the negative side, judges are a conservative lot. The worries about an activist judiciary notwithstanding, they tend to defer to the other branches of government.

Still, there’s some hope they may be up to the task. Last week’s session dealt with two similar cases, one out of California and the other from Boston. In both, police had seized a suspect’s cellphone during an arrest and then, without a warrant, went through it, pulling out information that was later used for successful convictions.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” absent probable cause and a warrant, but the word “unreasonable” introduces complications. Right now, for example, it’s deemed reasonable that arresting cops can look through your wallet without a warrant. Law enforcement argues a smartphone is no different.

But it truly is different, a point a number of Supreme Court justices seemed to get. “People carry their entire lives on cellphones,” more left-wing Justice Elena Kagan observed. Centrist Anthony Kennedy warned that “we are living in a new world.” And from the right, Antonin Scalia thought it “absurd” that police could access so much information about a person’s life — bank records, diaries, tax returns, health conditions — after an arrest for even a minor offense such as not wearing a seatbelt.

Oral arguments aren’t decisions, and we won’t know the outcome of the cases for a couple of months. It seems unlikely, however, that the justices will buy wholeheartedly into the government’s position. The court may simply require warrants for all smartphone searches or perhaps will seek a middle ground, such as allowing something in exigent circumstances but nothing too intrusive.

Either way, it’ll be the justices drawing a line the rest of government would rather not see. It’s a disturbing truth, made in Captain America but also on display in these cases: Those in power resist any limits on their power. But absent those limits, the nightmare scenarios of even big-screen hits loom uncomfortably close.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on May 4, 2014.