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A bill approved by the U.S. House yesterday would require school districts around the country to establish policies making it easier for teachers and school officials to conduct wide scale searches of students. These searches could take the form of pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how administrators interpret the law.

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) would require any school receiving federal funding–essentially every public school–to adopt policies allowing teachers and school officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any time, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Saying they suspect that one student might have drugs could give officials the authority to search every student in the building.

Will videos be required to provide evidence that searches are carried out in the spirit of the law, including body cavities? And would this evidence have to be provided to Congress to show they are in compliance to receive their funding?

Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

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Steven Howards saw a news story one morning this summer reporting the latest casualty totals from Iraq, and a few hours later had the rare opportunity to voice his feelings to a man he considers directly responsible.

Doing so, Howards said, sent him to jail for allegedly harassing the vice president of the United States. And now he is responding with a federal lawsuit against the Secret Service agent who put him in handcuffs.

The suit filed Tuesday alleges that Howards was arrested in retaliation for having exercised his First Amendment right of free speech, and that his arrest also violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful arrest.

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So Howards approached the vice president and told him, ” ‘Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.’ And I moved on. I didn’t want to give anybody any excuses to come after me.”

But a few minutes later, according to Howards, he was walking back across the mall with his younger son, Jonah, then 8, when he was approached by an agent identified in the lawsuit as Virgil D. “Gus” Reichle Jr.

The agent, Howards said, “came out of the shadows and literally said, ‘Did you assault the vice president?’

“If this had happened, I would think if they were doing their job, I would have been face-down in the concrete five or 10 minutes earlier,” said Howards. “To me, this was just absolute, transparent harassment.”