Year: 2013

Bloomberg has dropped $350,000 in an attempt to buy the race. All we have are our votes, so if you’re in those two districts, please be sure to vote today.

The money from Bloomberg, an advocate for stricter gun laws with his group Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns, is formidable compared to any single contribution that recall backers have publicly disclosed. In all, Morse and Giron’s supporters have raised about $2.5 million, including Bloomberg’s contribution and $250,000 from billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.

And while recall backers have been mum about their spending, Democrats think the amount is formidable, noting that some of their opponents are nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their contributions.

In other words, their opponents are real grassroots organizations, and not a couple of rich assholes.

Victor Head, a 29-year-old plumber who organized the recall effort against Giron, said he and his friends were so enraged by what they saw at the state Capitol that they came to the simple conclusion: “No more sitting on the couch and shaking our fist at the TV.”

And that’s all it takes. A few motivated people can make a huge difference. Also, keep in mind that NRA is putting $361,700 into the recalls, and that money doesn’t come from a handful of wealthy patrons, it comes from you and me in 20 dollar increments here and there.

UPDATE: The stakes are high folks.

This isn’t something I could have ever believed I’d see a decade ago. More on the gutting of Chicago’s gun control ordinances at the Chicago Sun-Times. To quote Joe Biden, this is a big effin deal.

UPDATE: Originally I tried to embed the video directly, but it sets to autoplay if you embed it, which I find to be one of those obnoxious things web designers do.

They are tomorrow. Charles Cooke has a pretty good article about the recall efforts, and Jim Geraghty notes that Giron has enlisted some grassroots help of her own. Everyone who cares about Second Amendment rights in those districts need to get out to the polls. There’s absolutely no excuse for staying home.

Writes Joseph J. Ellis, in the Los Angeles Times:

The 2nd Amendment represented Madison’s attempt to respond to the fears of a standing army by assuring that national defense would reside in the states and in militias, not at the federal level in a professional army. The right to bear arms derived from the need to assure that state militia could perform its essential mission.

All this was what constitutional scholars call “settled law” until Heller, in which the high court ruled that the right to bear arms, despite the language of the 2nd Amendment and the historical context of its creation, existed independent of service in the militia.

I guess he missed the years of Second Amendment scholarship which generally convinced most of the legal academy that the “settled law” was anything but. Actually, Second Amendment law was far from settled in terms of collective rights. This article is full of ignorance on a great many topics, including the fact that “original intent” originalism has largely fallen out of fashion and has few supporters these days even among ardent originalists.

But even Scalia, fully aware of the legal precedents he was overturning, saw fit to insert the following caveats near the end of his opinion.

What legal precedents? Heller and McDonald have overturned nothing. Miller, in fact, is still valid case law because it was never the collective rights case that people imagined it to be.