“But Not For Statutory Rights”: Gun Nuts Ignore The First Amendment To “Protect” The Second
Protect the Second Amendment, screw the First!
Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported from the United States over his gun control views. And sadly, I’m not surprised.
Morgan has taken an aggressive stand for tighter U.S. gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting. Last week, he called a gun advocate appearing on his Piers Morgan Tonight show an “unbelievably stupid man.” And that is Mr. Morgan’s opinion, which he is entitled to, whether you like his accent or not. Entitled to, you ask? Is he a citizen of this country?! Well, there are a few folks, namely our founding forefathers, and more currently constitutional legal experts, who were pretty clear with regard to whose speech is protected by the First Amendment. Noncitizens and permanent residents are also protected under the First Amendment–that is unless, like those of us who are citizens, we’re yelling fire in a crowded theatre.
But that doesn’t seem to faze the gun rights activists. They are fighting back, creating a petition on December 21 on the White House E-petition website. This was done by a user in Texas accusing Morgan of engaging in a “hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution” by targeting the Second Amendment. It demands he be deported immediately for “exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.” The petition has already hit the 25,000 signature threshold to get a White House response.
Unfortunately for Tex and those who signed this petition, they shouldn’t hold their breath. Noncitizens, and especially permanent residents, have statutory rights to remain in the country unless they’ve done (or there’s sufficient reason to think they’ve done) certain bad things—at least until Congress revises the statutes to broaden the grounds for deportation. Even if the Executive Branch decides to deport someone, it has to have statutorily authorized grounds, and it has to provide hearings at which an immigration judge decides whether the conditions for deportation are met. The government may not criminally punish noncitizens—or presumably impose civil liability on them—based on speech that would be protected if said by a citizen. See Bridges v. Wixon (1945).
And how has Piers Morgan responded? Actually, he seemed unfazed, perhaps even amused by all of this. On Twitter he urged his followers to sign the petition, and in response to one article about the petition he said “bring it on” as he appeared to track the petition’s progress. “If I do get deported from America for wanting fewer gun murders, are there any other countries that will have me?” he wrote.
What bothers me about this is the blatant hypocrisy of those gun rights proponents. As a liberal, I push for stricter gun control measures; I always have, even before Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuscon, Aurora, Portland, and Newtown, and I have been attacked by the right for wanting to take away their Second Amendment right to bear arms. I and other liberals have been clear we don’t want to take their rights away, we just want to protect other Americans, especially our children by restricting military-style weapons with high volume magazine clips. Yet when someone voices their opinion and it is completely contrary to what a gun proponent believes, they have no trouble tramping on their rights…namely the First Amendment.
Look, I’m no Piers Morgan fan. As a broadcaster, I get tired of radio programmers and networks hiring people with pretty British accents. I’m a fan of not only buying American, but “hiring American,” since I know so many people out there who are unemployed in the field of broadcasting and, quite frankly many of whom I feel are much more talented and qualified interviewers and broadcasters than Mr. Morgan. I don’t make the decisions as to who they put on the air at CNN, but I do have a choice what network or program I tune into. And I can assure you, Mr. Morgan’s show is not on my list of favorites programmed on my television.
If the gun enthusiasts really want to hurt Mr. Morgan for his opinions, they should realize it’s his ratings, not his residence address they should be attacking. Because if Mr. Morgan’s ratings plummet, CNN will hand him his walking papers and as Mitt Romney once proposed, Mr. Morgan will deport himself–perhaps back over the pond for a better cup of tea.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, December 26, 2012
“A Very Naughty Boy”: John Boehner Gets More Than 2,000 Lumps Of Coal For Christmas
House Speaker John Boehner will be greeted by more than 2,000 pieces of coal when he returns to Washington after what was unlikely to have been a relaxing vacation in Ohio amid the standoff over the fiscal cliff.
The coal is being delivered by The Action—a campaign to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent—which says Boehner has been extra “naughty” this year.
Last week, Boehner proposed legislation called “Plan B” that would have ended the Bush-era tax cuts on those with income of up to $1 million, but some House Republicans refused to support it. Democrats and Republicans disagree over whether the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers should see higher rates, but both parties agree they want to avoid tax increases for the middle class.
On NaughtyBoehner.com, The Action entreats supporters to call Boehner’s office because he “is desperate to protect the richest Americans at the expense of the rest of us.” For each call made, the campaign promises to hand deliver one lump of coal to Boehner’s office. As of this writing, the campaign counts 2333 pieces of coal as ready for delivery.
President Barack Obama will be back in Washington Thursday to try to negotiate once more with Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff before tax increases and spending cuts kick in at the end of the year.
By: Elizabeth Flock, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, December 26, 2012
“Rejecting Their Own Ideas”: Republicans Are Creating Needless Difficulties For Themselves And The Country
We know that the House of Representatives has been unable to reach a sensible deal to avoid unnecessary fiscal trouble at the first of the year because of right-wing Republicans’ aversion to tax increases.
But there is another issue on which conservatives are creating needless difficulties for themselves and the country: It’s harder and harder for politicians on the right to think straight about health care.
Conservatives once genuinely interested in finding market-based ways for the government to expand health insurance coverage have, since the rise of Obamacare, made choices that are dysfunctional, even from their own perspective.
Start with the decision of the vast majority of Republican governors to refuse to set up the state insurance exchanges required under the law. The mechanisms would allow more than 20 million Americans to buy coverage. They were originally a conservative idea for large, trustworthy marketplaces where individuals and families could buy plans of their choice.
Many liberals preferred a national exchange, in which the federal government could institute strong rules to protect consumers and offer broader options. This was the path the House took, but the final Senate-passed law went with state-level exchanges in deference to Republican sensibilities.
To ensure that governors could not just prevent their residents from having access to the new marketplaces, the bill required the federal government to run them if states defaulted. So, irony of ironies, in declining to set up state exchanges, conservative governors are undermining states’ rights and giving liberals something far closer to the national system they hoped for. As Robert Laszewski, an industry critic of Obamacare, told The Post’s N.C. Aizenman, conservative governors are engaging in “cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face” behavior.
This is one of many forms of conservative health-care unreason. The “fiscal cliff” debate has been distorted because the problems confronting federal finances are consistently misdescribed. We do not have “an entitlement problem.” We have a giant health-care cost problem.
Our major non-military fiscal challenges lie in Medicare and Medicaid. In principle, conservatives should seek to find ways of holding down health-care inflation in both the private and public sectors. In practice, they see most efforts to take on this issue system-wide as examples of big government run wild. They seem to have a vague idea that markets can yet solve a problem that markets have not been very good at solving.
The result is that conservatives would either let government get bigger, or they’d save money by throwing ever more risk onto individuals by undercutting core government guarantees.
Their most outrageous move was the big lie that the original health-care bill included “death panels.” This would have been laughable if it had not been so pernicious. The provision in question would simply have paid for consultations by terminally ill patients — if they wanted them — with their physicians on their best options for their care. Few things are more important to the future of health care than thinking straight about the costs and benefits (to patients and not just the system) of end-of-life treatments. For those of us who oppose physician-assisted suicide, it’s urgent to promote, rather than block, serious, moral and compassionate discussions of the difficult issues raised by high-tech medicine.
Or take the health-care law’s creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, known as IPAB. It’s a 15-member body charged with finding ways of cutting the costs of treatment under Medicare. Congress would have the final say, but through a fast-track process. Yet the ink was barely dry on Obama’s signature of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) when a group of Republican senators introduced what they called the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act, to get rid of IPAB. Thus did an innovative effort to save money meet with a slap in the face. Conservatives barely acknowledge other cost-saving experiments in the ACA.
Is it any wonder that our fiscal politics are so dysfunctional? Yes, we liberals are very reluctant to cut access to various government health-insurance programs. With so many Americans still uninsured, we are wary of depriving more people of coverage. But we fully accept the need to contain government health spending.
Yet given the conservatives’ habit of walking away even from their own ideas (the exchanges, for example) and of rejecting progressive efforts to save money, is it any wonder that liberals suspect them of greater interest in dismantling programs than in making them more efficient? We won’t find genuine common ground on deficits until we resolve this dilemma.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 26, 2012
“NRA Vs. Common Sense”: The NRA Is Selling Guns, Not Saving Lives
When the National Rifle Association promised “meaningful contributions” to prevent another massacre like the recent horror in Newtown, Conn., I didn’t expect much, but I hoped for more than what we got.
After a mentally ill gunman killed 20 children and seven adults, including himself, a remorseful public has been jerked alert once again to the need for some sensible gun reforms.
I had hoped NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre might try for a middle ground with some common-sense reforms on which gun owners and non-owners tend to agree — like measures that can help keep guns out of the hands of the mentally or criminally unfit.
But, no, LaPierre hunkered down. His “meaningful contributions” sounded less concerned with promoting gun safety than promoting gun sales.
The firearms trade business must have been delighted. The guns-and-ammunition industry has contributed between $14.7 million and $38.9 million to the NRA’s corporate-giving campaign since 2005, according to a report last year by the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy nonprofit. The trade appears to be getting its money’s worth.
LaPierre’s big news: He called for armed guards and armed schoolteachers in all of our schools. My initial thought: As soon as some teacher’s gun is stolen by a rambunctious student, that’ll be the end of that idea.
But, no, arming guards or even teachers is not a totally goofy idea. It’s not very original, either. “Across the country, some 23,200 schools — about one-third of all public schools — had armed security staff in the 2009-10 school year, the most recent year for which data are available,” The New York Times reports. Most are high schools in troubled areas, although a K-12 school in rural Harrold, TX, has allowed teachers to carry concealed weapons since 2007, after proper training. Lawmakers in at least six other states are considering similar policies, according to news reports.
But armed guards are not the panacea that many imagine they might be. Columbine High School in Colorado, for example, had an armed guard on duty during the murderous rampage of two students. He even engaged in a shootout with one of them, according to the official report on the tragedy. But he failed to stop either of the two teens before police arrived and they had killed themselves.
And Virginia Tech’s campus police had their own trained SWAT team. Yet they, too, failed to stop a student before he killed 33 in 2007, including himself.
“There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people,” said LaPierre. No, he was not taking about the gun industry. He was talking about the entertainment industry.
He lambasted violent in movies, videogames, a coarsening of the culture and, ah, yes, that all-purpose scapegoat, the news media — as if massacres were not worthy of public attention.
What about common-sense gun reforms? At least two recent polls, for example, show large numbers of gun owners and non-owners favor measures that help keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, suspected terrorists and people who have a criminal past. But the NRA headquarters opposes them.
Most gun owners who were not NRA members supported a national gun registry, a ban on magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and a ban on semi-automatic weapons, according to a poll last year by YouGov, a global marketing firm. Most NRA members in the poll — and the national organization — opposed all three of those measures.
In an NBC Meet the Press interview Sunday, LaPierre rejected a proposed ban on large magazines, saying he didn’t think it would “do any good.” Yet, such a ban might have saved lives in Tucson, Ariz., last year. Jared L. Loughner was tackled and restrained by onlookers when he paused to reload his oversized magazines. That was after he shot 19 people, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing six.
If only he had been limited to smaller magazines, one wonders, how many other lives might have been spared? But LaPierre and the NRA don’t seem to be interested in “if only” scenarios that don’t fit their arguments — or promote more sales of guns and ammo.
By: Clarence Page, The National Memo, December 26, 2012
“Republican Fear Factor”: Even Syrians Are More Optimistic About The Future Than US Republicans
Syrians, who are fighting a civil war in which 40,000 of them have died just this year, are still more optimistic about their own future than US Republicans, recent polls reveal. Republicans also are much less optimistic than Greeks, whose economy may still bring down the whole of Europe, and Afghans, who are hopeful despite three decades of on-and-off civil war.
A Gallup Poll of global sentiment concludes that Greeks are the most pessimistic people in the world, in fact much more so than Syrians. But the survey did not break down results by political party. If it had, US Republicans would have topped the list. A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that 72% of Republicans are fearful about what 2013 holds in store for them personally. (In the same poll, just 20% of Democrats are fearful.)
According to Gallup, 42% of Greeks foresee a grimmer future, along with 33% of Syrians. And in a recent Asia Foundation poll, 52% of Afghans said their country is moving in the right direction.
What troubles Republicans?
The Republican fear factor is a gigantic leap into trepidation—in 2008, 54% of Republicans said they fear what is ahead; in 2006, the number in the same poll was just 20%. What troubles Republicans? It is fear for the world at large (79% expect a bleaker 2013, compared with 36% of Democrats) and the US economy in particular (82% are pessimistic about next year; 28% of Democrats feel that way).
But what about their personal situation did the Republican respondents fear? The poll does not appear to have asked. But oddly, 62% of Republicans are optimistic about their family’s financial situation next year, lower than the 78% of cheery Democrats but a definitively rosy outlook.
One possibly correlating number is support for owning guns: If you own a weapon or support liberalized availability of them, you may be a hunter, but you may also seek protection against a perceived threat out there. In a Pew Poll released Dec. 20—after the Sandy Hook massacre in which a gunman murdered 20 first-grade students with a semi-automatic weapon—69% of Republicans said continuing to protect the right to own guns is more important than regulating ownership (72% of Democrats took the opposite view).
But are we talking fear, such as worry about personal safety, or something more idiosyncratic? Consider the Gallup poll, whichalso gauged “positive emotions” (this is a relevant question since one can reasonably regard fear of the future as a negative emotion). It found that 85% of Panamanians feel pretty good, compared with just 46% of Singaporeans, who are much wealthier on a GDP basis. Here are the questions that comprised the gauge of this good feeling:
Did you feel well-rested yesterday? Were you treated with respect all day yesterday? Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?
By: Steve Levin, Contributor, Business Insider, December 25, 2012
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