“A Larger Terrifying Trend”: Nullification Must Never Be On The Table
About a week ago, Robert Schlesinger reported on a bill in Montana’s state legislature that would have “forbidden Big Sky law enforcement from enforcing any new assault weapons ban or ban on high capacity magazines,” even if such a law were passed by Congress. In effect, a majority of Montana state lawmakers said they want to be able to nullify a federal law they don’t like.
In this case, the Montana bill was largely pointless — a law that doesn’t exist can’t be rejected — and was vetoed by Gov. Steve Bullock (D) anyway. But the effort was a reminder about a larger, rather terrifying trend: a growing number of state Republican policymakers consider nullification a legitimate use of state power.
For context, it’s worth remembering that there was a rather spirited debate in the mid-19th century over whether states could choose to ignore federal laws. The debate was resolved by a little something called the U.S. Civil War — those who argued in support of nullification lost.
And for the last several generations, that was that. But as Republican politics has grown increasingly radicalized in recent years, the discredited legal principle has started to move from the outer fringes of American life to state capitols. Consider this story out of Tennessee this week, for example.
The state House and Senate speakers have agreed to have a joint committee conduct hearings over the summer and fall on federal government laws and executive orders that may have exceeded constitutional authority, Sen. Mae Beavers, R-Mount Juliet, told colleagues Tuesday.
Beavers’ announcement came after declaring she would not push for passage of the “Balance of Powers Act” (SB1158), which would have set up a joint legislative committee to determine which federal laws should be nullified in Tennessee by the General Assembly.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but there’s nothing to discuss — state lawmakers can’t pick and choose which federal laws they’ll honor. But instead of realizing this basic tenet of modern American law, Tennessee will actually hold hearings on a concept that is, in the most literal sense, radical.
And it’s not just Tennessee.
As Schlesinger noted in his report, some states are looking to nullify gun laws that don’t yet exist; West Virginia is thinking about nullifying federal regulations on coal mining; and Mississippi, like Tennessee, is eyeing the creation of a nullification committee to pare down federal laws the state doesn’t like.
Let’s also not forget that in North Carolina, there’s pending legislation that says the First Amendment doesn’t apply to the state, federal courts can’t determine what’s constitutional under the U.S. Constitution, and North Carolina has the right to declare its own state religion.
If we broaden the context a bit, we can even look at the anti-abortion measures recently approved in North Dakota and Arkansas. Lawmakers were well aware of the fact that these bills are unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court precedent, but they decided it didn’t matter.
It’s my sincere hope that this is just a bizarre fad among radicalized Republicans, and to borrow a phrase, the “fever” gripping GOP politics will soon fade without incident. Chances are, cooler heads will prevail and these various nullification efforts will fade away, left to become a punch-line among future historians marveling at the far-right hysteria of the Obama era.
But I’d lying if I said this isn’t disconcerting and more than a little alarming.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 4, 2013
“Master Manipulator Of Emotion”: Mike Huckabee Stokes Fear With Nazi Gun Control Comparison
Pastor-politician Mike Huckabee continues to stoke fear and paranoia regarding the sensible gun safety measures proposed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting that killed 20 children and six adults, the latest gun-related massacre that occurred because of what many consider to be lax gun laws in America, compared to other developed nations.
On his radio show Wednesday afternoon, Huckabee responded to a caller who repeated the lie that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis turned Germany from a democracy into a dictatorship by registering and collecting guns, by saying:
“When you bring that up there are people that get crazy on us. They’ll start saying, ‘oh there you go, comparing to the Nazis.’ And I understand the reaction. But it’s the truth. You cannot take people’s rights away if they are resisting and have the means to resist. But once they’re disarmed and the people who are trying to take over have all the power — not just political, not just financial — but they have the physical power to domesticate us and to subjugate us to their will, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, other than just plan to die in the course of resistance…in every society and culture where dictators take over, one of the things they have to do is get control of the military and police and ultimately all the citizens and make sure the citizens are disarmed and can’t fight in the streets. Gosh I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Besides making a slippery-slope argument that modest gun reform will somehow lead to weapon confiscation and a Nazi-style dictatorship, Huckabee and the caller display a dangerously ignorant reading of history regarding gun laws in Nazi Germany. Mother Jones, Salon, and other publications have refuted the oft-repeated assertion among gun rights absolutists that gun control allowed Hitler’s rise to power and made the Holocaust possible.
First, it is worth noting that other developed, democratic nations with stronger gun laws, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and others, did not see a dictator rise to power and “domesticate” and “subjugate” their people when they enacted new gun measures. In fact, their democracies are still intact with the people still deciding important issues peacefully through the ballot box. What these countries have done is made their societies safer by decreasing gun violence.
Now back to the right wing’s seemingly favorite comparison when discussing anything President Obama has proposed to help the American people — Nazis.
The reality is that the Weimar Republic following World War I actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime, in part to disarm the violent extremists causing havoc, like the paramilitary SA brownshirts. The Nazi Weapon Law of 1938 actually loosened gun restrictions, except for Jews and other persecuted minorities.
But there were only 214,000 Jews living in Germany when World War II started and between 160,000 and 180,000 were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. That is a small fraction of the six million Jews from other countries who were murdered and who wouldn’t have been subject to the Nazi gun laws. The mighty Russian army lost more than 10 million soldiers fighting the Wermacht on the Eastern Front, so it is unrealistic to think that a Jewish armed uprising in Eastern Europe would have beaten back the German military machine. That is why many say a strong Israeli army is so important to preventing another holocaust, the reasoning being that a Jewish state with a modern military is the only match for a genocidal force like the Nazis.
In reality, it is the Tea Party “patriots” intimidating people with loaded assault rifles, Republican efforts to suppress the vote, and right-wing radio hosts like Huckabee stoking fear and paranoia that more closely resemble the tactics used by Hitler’s Nazis to gain power.
Gun control and Second Amendment-analysis website GunCite concludes the following in a story titled “The Myth of Nazi Gun Control”: “There are no lessons about the efficacy of gun control to be learned from the Germany of the first half of [the 20th] century. It is all too easy to forget the seductive allure that fascism presented to all the West, bogged down in economic and social morass. What must be remembered is that the Nazis were master manipulators of popular emotion and sentiment, and were disdainful of people thinking for themselves. There is the danger to which we should pay great heed. Not fanciful stories about Nazis seizing guns.”
By: Josh Marks, The National Memo, April 5, 2013
“Gun Lobby Goons At It Again”: The NRA’s Disarming Plan To Arm Schools
The gun-lobby goons were at it again.
The National Rifle Association’s security guards gained notoriety earlier this year when, escorting NRA officials to a hearing, they were upbraided by Capitol authorities for pushing cameramen. The thugs were back Tuesday when the NRA rolled out its “National School Shield” — the gun lobbyists’ plan to get armed guards in public schools — and this time they were packing heat.
About 20 of them — roughly one for every three reporters — fanned out through the National Press Club, some in uniforms with gun holsters exposed, others with earpieces and bulges under their suit jackets.
In a spectacle that officials at the National Press Club said they had never seen before, the NRA gunmen directed some photographers not to take pictures, ordered reporters out of the lobby when NRA officials passed and inspected reporters’ briefcases before granting them access to the news conference.
The antics gave new meaning to the notion of disarming your critics.
By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don’t carry guns to news conferences — and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA’s Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn’t pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn’t going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower.
Thus has it gone so far in the gun debate in Washington. The legislation is about to be taken up in Congress, but by most accounts the NRA has already won. Plans for limiting assault weapons and ammunition clips are history, and the prospects for meaningful background checks are bleak. Now, The Post’s Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe report, the NRA is proposing language to gut the last meaningful gun-control proposal, making gun trafficking a federal crime. Apparently, the gun lobby thinks even criminals deserve Second Amendment protection.
If the NRA has its way, as it usually does, states will soon be weakening their gun laws to allow more guns in schools. The top two recommendations Hutchinson announced Tuesday involved firearms in the schoolhouse. The first: “training programs” for “designated armed school personnel.” The second: “adoption of model legislation by individual states to allow for armed school personnel.”
Hutchinson claimed that his task force, which came up with these ideas, had “full independence” from the NRA. By coincidence, the proposals closely matched those announced by the NRA before it formed and funded the task force. The task force did scale back plans to protect schools with armed volunteer vigilantes, opting instead for arming paid guards and school staff — at least one in every school. States and school districts “are prepared” to pay for it, Hutchinson declared.
The task force garnished the more-guns recommendations with some good ideas, such as better fencing, doors and security monitoring for schools, and more mental-health intervention. But much of that is in the overall Senate legislation that the NRA is trying to kill.
To close his case, Hutchinson introduced a secret weapon, “special guest” Mark Mattioli, the father of one of the Newtown, Conn., victims. Mattioli told reporters that there had been “nine school shootings since Newtown” but that Newtown was “off the bell curve, if you will, with respect to the impact.”
Perhaps that’s because the Newtown killer had a military-style gun with a 30-round magazine?
Hutchinson, queried by a reporter from Connecticut, said that limiting assault weapons is “totally inadequate” because it “doesn’t stop violence in the schools.” Likewise, he told CBS News’s Nancy Cordes, limiting magazine clips won’t work as well as his plan to “give the schools more tools” — i.e., guns. And he told CNN’s Jim Acosta that background checks weren’t related to his focus of school safety.
Fox News’s Chad Pergram mentioned the gun-control legislation. “Do you see any common ground?” he asked.
“This will be the common ground,” Hutchinson said of his proposals.
If so, American schoolchildren may grow accustomed to the sort of scene Hutchinson caused Tuesday, protected by more armed guards than a Third World dictator.
Hutchinson, pressed by reporters about the armed goons, said: “You go into a mall, there is security. And so there is security here at the National Press Club.”
A reporter asked Hutchinson what he was afraid of.
“There’s nothing I’m afraid of. I’m very wide open,” Hutchinson replied, separated from his unarmed questioners by an eight-foot buffer zone, a lectern, a raised podium, a red-velvet rope and a score of gun-toting men. “There’s nothing I’m nervous about.”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 2, 2013
“The New Social Order”: Republicans Are Losing The American Culture War
The culture wars are back and this time the left is winning.
More than anything else, the rapid growth in support for gay marriage illustrates the changes in American culture and politics. We are living in a completely different society than we were in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The boomers are on their way out, taking their conservative stands with them, and the millennials are proudly marching in, progressive views in hand.
There was a time when Democrats lived in constant fear of “Guns, God and Gays.” Now it’s the Republicans’ turn to worry as larger numbers of Americans support gay marriage, immigration reform and gun control. The GOP will have to come up with a new formula to win campaigns or the party will become irrelevant. Adapt or die!
Now it’s time for Republicans to fear the culture wars just as Democrats did in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Last week, Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio switched his position to support gay marriage. Even Democrats in red states like Jon Tester of Montana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Kay Hagen of North Carolina have seen the light and now support same-sex marriage.
In 2003, according to an ABC News/Washington poll, a majority of Americans opposed gay marriage by a margin of 58 percent to 36 percent. Ten years later, most Americans are onboard with same sex nuptials and the numbers are exactly the opposite of what they were in 2003. In the new ABC News/Washington Post poll, four of every five (81 percent) Americans under 30 favor gay marriage. As the millennial generation becomes a greater and greater proportion of the population and the electorate, opposition to gay marriage will get even smaller. In a CBS News survey of American Catholics, three out of five (62 percent) of the faithful support gay marriage.
A majority of Americans now support gun control and immigration reform. In the new ABC News/Washington Post survey, nine in ten Americans (91 percent) favor background checks on gun purchases and a clear majority (57 percent favor to 41 percent oppose) supports a ban on assault weapons. A new survey by the Public Religion Research institute indicates at six in ten (61 percent) Americans want undocumented aliens to get legal status.
The left may be winning battles on most of the fronts in the culture wars, but there is one issue that has put progressives on the defensive. Public support for Roe v Wade remains high, but state governments in the West and in the South have made it more difficult for women to make decisions about their own bodies.
According to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute a clear majority (56 percent legal to 38 percent illegal) of Americans want abortion to be legal all or most of the time. The states of North Dakota and Arkansas have both enacted laws that strictly limit abortions. Both laws violate the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade and federal courts will probably nullify them.
It will be difficult for the GOP to cope with the new social order. Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus has been beat up by conservatives since he released a study last week that called for the GOP to moderate its issue stands to become politically effective. This week, Priebus felt the heat from the extremists in his party and he backtracked and said the GOP will still have the same agenda which was the party platform adopted at the 2012 national convention.
If the chairman was referring to the platform that calls for outlawing all abortions without any exceptions, the GOP will be spending the next generation in the deep freeze of the political Arctic.
By: Brad Bannon, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, April 1, 2013
“In Pursuit Of Maximum Mayhem”: Was Newtown The Price Of The Second Amendment?
The gunman in the Newtown, Conn., massacre fired 154 bullets from his Bushmaster military-style rifle in fewer than five minutes, killing 20 first-graders and six adults. He brought with him 10 large-capacity magazines, each holding up to 30 rounds, which allowed him to reload quickly. He also carried two semiautomatic handguns, one of which he used to take his own life.
Is this supposed to be the price of the Second Amendment? Is this the kind of America we want?
I know that realists have concluded there is little chance of getting an assault-weapons ban through Congress. I know that many gun-control advocates believe legislation mandating universal background checks, thought to have a reasonably good chance of being approved, can be even more valuable in preventing Newtown-style tragedies. I know that politics is the art of the possible.
But still it’s hard for me to accept that the right to “keep and bear arms” extends to the kind of arsenal that Adam Lanza — and his mother, Nancy, whom he also killed — assembled and kept in their home.
Lanza was outfitted like a commando, with guns and ammo clips engineered to kill the maximum number of people in the minimum amount of time. There were other weapons in the family’s possession that would have seemed better suited for recreation or self-defense — the reasons why, according to the National Rifle Association, we need to arm ourselves to the teeth. But Lanza left a .22-caliber rifle at home and a 12-gauge shotgun in the car he drove to the school. He had maximum mayhem on his mind.
Search-warrant documents released by Connecticut authorities suggest just how disturbed Lanza was. Among the items discovered was a newspaper article about a 2008 shooting at Northern Illinois University in which six people, including the perpetrator, were killed. There were also three photographs “with images of what appears to be a deceased human covered with plastic and what appears to be blood.”
Police found books on Asperger’s syndrome, a condition related to autism that Lanza, 20, was thought to have. They also found a “military-style uniform” and written journals whose contents have not been disclosed. An affidavit in support of the search warrant quotes an unnamed witness who described Lanza as “a shut-in and an avid gamer who plays ‘Call of Duty,’ ” an extremely violent — and popular — video game.
You read the documents and you begin to form the impression of an extremely troubled young man. The police found NRA shooting certificates for both mother and son, bolstering reports that Nancy Lanza took her son shooting and encouraged his interest in guns, perhaps as a way to bring him out of his shell.
The NRA would say that the issue here is mental health, not firearms. But there are plenty of young men who play gory video games and harbor violent fantasies. How can you pick out the few who lose all distinction between fantasy and reality? Clearly, Nancy Lanza couldn’t. I don’t think anyone really can.
Given that guns are enshrined in the Constitution, there may have been no way to keep firearms out of the Lanza home. But if the federal ban on military-style assault weapons had not been allowed to expire, we might have seen less carnage in Newtown. Lanza probably wouldn’t have been able to get off so many shots in so little time. He wouldn’t have been able to fire so many rounds without pausing to reload.
Maybe just one life would have been saved. To me, that life is worth more than being in the good graces of the NRA; to members of Congress, perhaps not.
I don’t want to play down the significance of universal background checks. Even if they might not have had any impact on the Newtown slayings — Lanza’s mother bought the guns, and it’s unclear whether she would have been red-flagged — it is obvious that comprehensive checks would keep some guns out of the wrong hands and save lives.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pouring millions of dollars into ad campaigns pressuring Congress to stand up to the NRA. President Obama, in a White House appearance Thursday with mothers of gun victims, noted that “right now, 90 percent of Americans support background checks. . . . How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything?”
“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten” the Newtown tragedy, Obama said. “Now is the time to turn that heartbreak into something real.”
Amen.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 28, 2013
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