The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Yes, even Nudists have a lobby in Washington D.C. now. You’d think under our federal system that would be largely a state issue, but no. I noticed they mention the nudist lobbyists don’t show up nude, but show up in suits. How do they expect to get people to accept public nudity going about things like that? How will it ever be normal and accepted? Clearly they have not taken their lessons from the open carry movement.
Hat tip to Sister Toldjah
Bloggers running for public office. At some point, we have to stop talking and start doing. While I can promise you that I will never run for public office, my contribution offline is going to be something else, I’m happy to support others if they give it a go. I wish Bruce the best of luck.
Dave Hardy has some comments on a recent article speaking of Justice Souter’s philosophy when it comes to constitutional interpretation. To quote Justice Souter directly:
A choice may have to be made, not because language is vague, but because the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well. These paired desires of ours can clash, and when they do a court is forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good and another one. The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.
The problem with this balancing interest is that it leaves entirely too much room for judges to make-up law from whole cloth, using their own preferences rather than being tied to the text of the document. The New York Times went on to note:
Justice Souter named no contemporary names. He did not mention Justice Antonin Scalia, whose “originalist†doctrine of constitutional interpretation made inroads in recent years, most notably in the 2008 decision, from which Justice Souter dissented, declaring an individual right to gun ownership under the Second Amendment. But I have to think he had Justice Scalia in mind when he observed that “behind most dreams of a simpler Constitution there lies a basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise.â€
I don’t think it’s so much a dream of a simpler constitution, and even a textualist is going to acknowledge there are places where the text is less than clear. But where the text is clear, we should follow it. The big problem with Souter’s approach is that it’s hard to see how his balancing test keeps the judiciary constrained to its judicial powers. The kind of balancing of interest that Souter calls for is more properly the realm of Congress, and not the judiciary.
I don’t go as far as some conservatives that suggest the courts should never interfere with the prerogatives of the elected branch. Starting with a default presumption that Congress wouldn’t pass an unconstitutional law is just as much a fallacy as what Souter believes. Where the law is ambiguous, or where Congress’ claims of power are so wildly beyond their constitutional mandate, the courts needs to act. Souter brings up segregation. Segregation should have been outlawed by the 14th Amendment. That wasn’t any evolving constitutional doctrine, so much as a half century of the judiciary trying to escape its clear mandate. I agree with what Dave Hardy says on the matter:
Doesn’t that mean he accepts that Plessey was right when it was decided, “right here, right now,” and became wrong half a century later? I’d rather prefer to think it was wrong and odious from the beginning, for reasons entirely external to the judges…. it just took them half a century to see the light.
Yep
Institute for Justice has this great and simple video on the issue of reporting lobbying activity as grassroots activists.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6GJQGUUdAw[/youtube]
In Washington, the state IJ is suing for their registration laws, the fines for not registering your activities with the government – even if you never contact an elected official yourself – are on par with those for extortion and identity theft. That’s nuts. In Massachusetts, you can choose to organize with your friends and neighbors for a little political activism without government consent or you can start a brothel – both carry the same punishment.
Did I get your attention?
I figured that a title about campaign finance reform wouldn’t grab too many eyeballs. But telling people about the intended result of this “reform” probably would. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while now, but decided that Dave Kopel’s release of his June First Freedom article on the subject made the issue more relevant for the blog.
There is one key to the Schumer-backed DISCLOSE Act that makes it dangerous for gun owners who want to organize in any meaningful manner: disclosure of all donors/members whose money may have funded independent expenditures to the FEC.
According to The New York Times, a “reform†bill might require advocacy groups (such as NRA) “to identify all their financial donors or set up separate accounts to handle political spending and identify the donors to that account.â€
Simply put: If NRA wants to use its general funds from member dues to speak out during election season, then NRA would have to give the federal government a list of every single NRA member.
The FEC donor databases are open to all, and the most user-friendly that makes looking up individuals easy and fast is the database available at OpenSecrets.org. Kopel uses the example that your boss could decide to cross-reference you to find out what you’re up to outside of work hours. At that point, you just have to hope he/she isn’t anti-gun, or you may find yourself in the unemployment line. Even if NRA maintains a separate fund for campaign expenditures, you can’t donate if you value your privacy.
We’re by far not the only issue concerned about these crazy disclosure agreements. The National Right to Life Committee is opposing the bill on the same grounds:
One of those regulations involves NRLC and other pro-life groups having to identify donors publicly anytime it runs communications in certain times that ask people to contact Congress about legislation related to pro-life concerns.
“Our members and supporters have a right to support our public advocacy about important and controversial issues without having their identifying information posted on the Internet, exposing them to harassment or retribution by those who may disagree with their beliefs,” NRLC concluded.
It’s pretty dangerous in some areas of the country to be socially conservative. See the harassment that same-sex marriage opponents faced in California as an exhibit of what pro-lifers – and possibly gun owners – could face.
Even the parts of the bill that aren’t dangerous for gun owners actively try to cut us off at the knees when it comes to political advertising. I’m not opposed to the spirit of an organization head doing a disclaimer as part of a commercial, but as specific as the DISCLOSURE Act is, it limits our options in order to cut our political effectiveness.
NRA advertisements always let you know that they’re paid for by NRA. Sometimes, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre appears as a spokesman in a commercial, while in others, it’s Chris W. Cox, chairman of NRA’s Political Victory Fund and executive director of NRA-ILA. Sometimes, NRA may choose to use someone else entirely. For example, Charlton Heston appeared in many NRA commercials during his long service to the Second Amendment.
The proposal would mean that in 1997, for example, when Heston— one of the most respected men in America—was an NRA officer but not president or CEO, an NRA commercial would have been required to cut the amount of time that Heston had to speak about the issues.
Anything that reduces the time we can put Chris Cox’s face & voice in front of female viewers is a loss for our issue. :)
In all seriousness, we have a diverse set of powerful leaders we can choose from at this point, and most Americans would probably agree that using any of them would meet the spirit of any disclosure laws. If Tom Selleck wants to get on screen as an NRA board member and talk about NRA-endorsed candidates or the issues at stake in a particular election, I’m sure most people would agree that it’s plenty transparent.
Politically, Congress still knows we can raise some hell on this issue. The House sponsor sat down with NRA recently to try and figure out their concerns, and they are specifically worried about last minute lobbying blitzes. It would seem that the pro-life groups and the Chamber of Commerce are planning to score the vote – and I suspect that the final product will determine whether or not NRA scores the vote. (If they do, Democrats may lose the votes they claim to have to pass it in the House.)
The Chamber has particular concerns about how this bill favors unions above other corporations:
For example, companies with government contracts worth $50,000 or more and those with foreign ownership would be banned from funding political ads and engaging in other campaign-related activity. The business group believes unions that receive federal grants, have collective bargaining agreements with the government or have international affiliates should be subject to similar limits.
Eugene Scalia, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and counsel to the Chamber, said the Disclose Act does not balance restrictions on corporations and unions equally, as previous campaign finance reform bills have.
“This bill is a departure from that tradition,†he said.
This is one of the reasons the NRLC argued the bill name should really stand for “Deterring Independent Speech about Congress except by Labor Organizations and Selected Elites.”
Right now, the bill has been postponed in the House. The committee vote was down party lines, and all efforts to make this bill more fair have been turned down based on party affiliation.
The intentional partisanship and one-sided nature of this was demonstrated by the defeat of a series of amendments in the committee mark-up that were proposed by Republicans. This included an amendment by Rep. Dan Lungren (R., Calif.) that would have extended the prohibition on government contractors to any unions that have representational contracts with the government, as well as an amendment by Rep. Gregg Harper (R., Miss.) that would have extended the same ban to any other recipient of government grants, such as the liberal groups that receive so many federal earmarks and other funds. When Lungren tried to extend the political activity ban on corporations with foreign shareholders or corporate directors to unions that receive dues from foreign nationals, that was also rejected.
This bill has got to go down in defeat. NRA is a one-issue organization, but they also look out for our ability to talk about that issue with the public during election season. Because many people who aren’t paid members receiving the magazine pay attention to NRA’s messaging, any effort to silence their efforts will only hurt gun rights on Election Day.
If you go around Pennsylvania, especially to county and municipal parks, you’ll find plenty of signs banning guns. Feel free to ignore them because they carry no weight of law. But now some towns are getting those laws off the books.
There’s a Michigan lawmaker who’s proposing the idea. This is unconstitutional, of course, as there are a number of cases that put the kibosh on licensing the First Amendment.  But I have to wonder how many of the journalists who might look at such a proposal with righteous indignation will turn around and propose allowing government to license the Second Amendment right?
Certainly, gun shows are not the main use of an iPad. However, this weekend, I actually found myself wanting one – a feeling I didn’t have even after watching Sebastian play around on one while we were in Charlotte or after watching all the times Dan from PAFOA could put it to good use on our trip.
But this weekend, I couldn’t help but miss all of the things we used to do in 2008 – running commercials & slides to promote our candidates quietly in the background of the show. It brought far more attention to the table, and it put names in front of folks in a more interesting way than simply hanging a sign.
For the first time, we weren’t against a wall that could serve us with sufficient power, and we just didn’t coordinate enough to justify hauling a monitor and laptop over there. But what could overcome those problems? An iPad.
We did buy a digital frame to at least display more interesting slides and attract attention. Again, we have the issue of power, and I can’t seem to get it to play the .jpgs I create as opposed to the ones I simply download. It’s a pain in the ass, and I’ve never spent more than about 3 minutes trying to figure it out. Instead we just started using it as a picture frame – crazy concept.
We also tried to fix an old and broken touchscreen monitor borrowed from one of Sebastian’s friends so we could run NRA’s Obama love quiz they made in 2008. Unfortunately, when we did get it working, we found out that it was one of very few that somehow ended up inverted. If you pushed the top, it read it as pushing at the bottom. That wasn’t going to work for us. There is the argument that the specific program was done in Flash, so it wouldn’t work on the iPad.
But the idea of being able to sign people up as volunteers online, take some sort of online quiz application that could be designed around the issue, or give them a quick tour of the website on a screen they can really see, that really appealed to me. And with NRA now sticking their toe into the water of development for iPhones, it isn’t outrageous that they consider some kind of app or at least Apple mobile product-friendly version of any Obama love quiz type programs in the future.
The biggest appeal for me this weekend would have been the “oh shiny” factor. Even though they are flying off the shelves, they are still exceptionally rare in the wild beyond the standard early adopting tech crowd. At a gun show, the iPad itself would bring more traffic to the table where we could start the conversation about whether the visitor is registered to vote and if they want to help any pro-gun politicians win this year.
Sebastian is certainly ready to buy, and if he would let me take it to gun shows to really use for the people, not just behind the table when we’re bored, then I’ll drive us to the Apple store with the pedal plastered to the floorboards.
This pretty much reflects how I feel about the issue, but said much better and with more completeness than I did:
Would free markets have been enough to break this long history of governmental force in support of racism? I would like to think so – but I also know that the libertarian solution requires a population of rational actors prepared to look out for their own economic interests. You let me know when you find a species that fits that model.
In my experience most extreme libertarian solutions require rational actors. Libertarians assume that most people are like themselves, when they generally aren’t. I still believe in small government, but I no longer care to go through mental gymnastics to try to figure out how to implement private market solutions to problems that Government is probably the only real viable solution. Anarchocapitalism is also one thing I’ve never really understood. To me it makes the same mistakes as to human nature that communism does.
Either way, when I was in high school I used to work in a union shop, in a job that was menial but was not union. The place never had an official policy of not hiring blacks, because that would be illegal, but I can tell you that no blacks worked there. I can also tell you that this wasn’t an accident. This is a shop that had serious problems getting and retaining good employees. Part of the issue is that people in hiring positions there felt that we can’t have “those people” coming in and taking our “good union jobs.” Maybe it’s gotten better since the late 80s, early 90s, but one of the reasons I’ve become so anti-union in my adulthood is because of what I witnessed growing up.
Uppity Northeasterners, who’ve never had to work in those kinds of environments, often like to pat themselves on the back that the North never implemented the kind of institutionalized racism that those cousin humping rednecks down south did. That is only superficially true. The North had, and probably still has plenty of institutionalized racism. We’re just better at hiding it.
If you haven’t followed the scandal down in South Carolina involving a blogger and a lawmaker, then be happy. The level of asshole-itude is incalculable. Bloggers actively trying to break up marriages with public announcements or meetings is never a pretty sight to see.
Short version: A political blogger known for being sharp tongued and full of attitude (not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se) announced on Monday that he had an affair with a married lawmaker who just happens to be the leading gubernatorial candidate in the Republican primary next month. He claimed the press was hot on the story and he was just coming out ahead of it. Funny about that since they don’t appear to have been at all. There were rumors, and one outlet may have looked into them, but no one was slated to publish anything as far as I’ve seen. The lawmaker gave an absolute denial that leaves no doubt her position is that she’s never had a physical relationship with any other man than her husband in their decade plus marriage.
Where it gets interesting: Erick from RedState has done some digging with South Carolina political folks and learned a few things. It seems that a competing campaign has been the source of the rumors that were floated, and all of “evidence” produced by the blogger – communication with the supposedly guilty campaign – actually says nothing of an affair, but really illustrates an effort to figure out more about the rumors. Even more interesting, RedState claims they will name the Republican campaign that paid the blogger to make these claims to destroy the other candidate.
Why this relates to this blog: First, if there are candidates out there who don’t wade into new media efforts very much, then there’s a black eye effect that could hurt other bloggers who try to reach out to campaigns. Second, I had my own – non-physical – encounter with this guy just before Charlotte that illustrates just how much of an asshole he is, and what a blowhard he is if he thinks he is getting attention.
I reached out to him about the Blog Bash since he seemed to be just a spirited blogger. (Unless you knew him through SC GOP politics, apparently his asshole factor wasn’t on full display.) He snapped back at me with some rant about the evils of the NRA because of a single grade issued like 10 years ago. He made sure to include cohorts on the email so he could brag that he told Fairfax to fuck off. Except, he didn’t know that I have my own version of “spirit,” shall we say. I wrote back to them all – staying sweet as pie (because that’s what a Southern woman does when she’s being evil) – pointing out that if he read even the first paragraph he would know that none of his complaints were remotely relevant to my email.
Getting publicly called out is a funny thing. Suddenly there was an apology email that didn’t include cohorts, but still declined, pointing out that he doesn’t consider himself to be a blogger, but a news outlet. So I dropped names of much bigger, national actual news outlets coming down to the events, and that really shut him up. I never made any effort, in the sweetness that would send most people into sugar shock, to invite him again.
It’s rather shocking to find out just how dirty South Carolina politics really is, when Mark Sanford’s “Appalachian hike” wasn’t anywhere near the worst of it.
When the news broke, I made the comment to Sebastian about how happy I was we got a glimpse of him before this happened. Since, after all, I like to keep the number of people who lie and cheat while breaking up marriages to a minimum at the Blog Bash.