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JL
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Aurora,
Sandy Hook, the Pulse Nightclub, the Parkland High School massacre, the Tree of
Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the El Paso Walmart, churches in South Carolina and Texas, and now, the Buffalo
Supermarket shooting and another in Orange County, California, exist to remind
us. Each time we said ‘Enough is Enough. This has to be stopped.’ And each time, nothing was done. The list goes on and on.
How come?
Well, this ‘doing nothing’ is supported by a Supreme Court misinterpretation of
the Second Amendment. In 2008 the late Justice Antonin Scalia said
that the first thirteen words of the Second Amendment were not a prerequisite
for that Amendment’s final fourteen words. They could stand alone.
His
tortuous reasoning gave great encouragement and support, even beyond the
circumstances of that particular case (D.C. vs. Heller) on which he wrote the
opinion, to those who advocated anyone carrying a gun anywhere they wanted in
this country and pretending they were a gun-slingin' cowboy in the old West or
more often, a misguided avenging devil. (We are not referring to those who have a 'legitimate' reason for possessing guns other than military-style assault weaponry which no civilian has any reason to possess.)
'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'
Here is
the way a solution must be reached. It is
the only way, short of repealing the Second Amendment. When a case where a local law restricting ownership of weapons
reaches the Supreme Court and that law is challenged based on the Second
Amendment, that Court must rule that the final fourteen words of the Second
Amendment cannot stand alone and they only apply when the condition stated in
its first thirteen words is met, which today would apply to a State’s National
Guard. Until the Supreme Court does
this, we will have repeated mass shootings because weapons will remain
available to anyone. It
is that simple. Once that decision is made, reasonable legislation to curb gun
violence will be passed and be able to survive legal challenges.
The ghost of Justice Scalia must be exorcised.
JL
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A Question: Would the SCOTUS be better off if it were not filled with lawyers? That is not a requirement. Often, they are in a world of their own and have lost touch with the people of this country. Perhaps five of the positions of Justices, including the Chief Justice, should not be lawyers.
(QAnon,
whose poisonous lies fueled the Buffalo murderer, hides behind the First
Amendment. It and other evils permitted
by the First Amendment must also be dealt with, but without diminishing our
democracy.)
I still,
from the days of the Sandy Hook and Parkland massacres, have a sign in my car’s
rear window reading “Want an Assault Rifle?
Join the Army.” I believe, from
what I see while driving around, that it is the only such sign remaining in Florida’s
Palm Beach and Broward Counties, even with the latter being the location of the
Parkland shooting four years ago. People forget all too quickly. (I also have an Army Veterans hat in that
rear window which possibly protects my car from being keyed or its tires from
being slashed by those who may violently disagree with the sign, and there are many
here locally.)
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JL
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Racial Inspiration for the Buffalo Shooter
And meanwhile, could inspiration for the Buffalo shooting be directed toward right-wing racists, such as Tucker Carlson? Here is what NBC's Daniel Arkin had to say about it yesterday.
"Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is facing intense scrutiny from extremism experts, media watchdogs and progressive activists who say there is a link between the top-rated host’s “great replacement” rhetoric and the apparent mindset of the suspect in the weekend’s deadly rampage in Buffalo, New York. The white suspect accused of killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood apparently wrote a “manifesto” espousing the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — elements of which Carlson has pushed on his weeknight show."
Responsibility should be directed toward him, just as those who inspired the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol should be held responsible for it, including the defeated former president. Words have consequences, particularly if they are designed to inspire acts of extreme violence.
JL
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Clues to Help Democrats Keep Control of Congress 25 Weeks From Now:
(1) Direct maximum resources to register persons of color and all women, two groups whose interests are always opposed by Republicans at all levels, local, State and Federal. Without their votes, Congress will be lost and American democracy will have failed in its 233 year experiment.
(2) Advocate a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Our defeated former president supported the now-defeated Israeli prime minister’s ‘one state’ methods that still exist as part of the compromise coalition that put Netanyahu out of office. Democrats should not support West Bank settlers, even if it means giving the votes of their American supporters to Republicans. They already vote that way anyway but advocating a two-state solution will stop a drain of progressive Democrats’ votes. It will be a net gain.
(3) This is not the time for Democrats to address the issue of charter schools. While they amount to an attack on public education, they do have Black and Latino support. Don’t give these groups a reason not to vote Democratic. A better choice is to improve public schools, to which the immediate threat is State vouchers used to finance uncontrollable right-wing schools, not charter schools. Until public schools are improved, and they must be, charter schools should be left alone, as a compromise. It is a hornet’s nest not to be stirred at this time.
JL
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Something to Think About
What if a list of countries that welcomed
immigrants had been published in Germany in 1933? Are we approaching the need for such a list
here and now?
JL
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Is the G.O.P. Waking Up?
Slowly, the Republican Party is recognizing
that it faces a dilemma. It has grown so
dependent on its extreme right-wing, on white supremacists, on lies so enormous
that it is hard to not believe them (this was what Goebbels specialized in
spreading in Germany), on Evangelical Christians, and on believers in
fictitious QAnon-circulated conspiracy theories, to win elections that this
‘tail’ that they have adopted is now ‘wagging the dog.’
Very dangerous extreme right-wing candidates, people who form their opinions from what they hear from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, are defeating seriously
conservative and still sane Republicans in primary elections! Perhaps it is best to let them call the
shots for their party for a while. Let
them run Jim Jordan for president and Marjorie Greene for vice-president!
It is slowly dawning on the GOP that such candidates
will be much easier for Democrats to defeat than ‘normal’ Republicans, accelerating the death of the Republican Party.
Ultimately, it will be reincarnated in its old self. Lincoln will smile from his tomb.
They might even want it to happen that way,
letting the Democrats do the job of purging their party of its malignancies
through the election process.
JL
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Is the SCOTUS Finessing the First
Amendment?
The First Amendment reads that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion’ but there are ‘back door’ ways for religious doctrine to be
established as part of our government’s structure. Besides respecting that Amendment, the very
size of both Houses of Congress prevents the First Amendment from being
attacked openly in Congress. There are
too many Senators and Representatives for that to happen. The smaller size of
the nine-member Supreme Court, however, is vulnerable to such incursions on
democracy from the bench. Check out what
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had to say about this danger:
Too Much
Church in State? By Maureen Dowd,
Opinion Columnist - May 14, 2022
 |
| Dowd |
“During
her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett tried to reassure
Democrats who were leery of her role as a “handmaid” in a Christian group
called “People of Praise.” The group has a male-dominated hierarchy and a rigid
view of sexuality reflecting conservative gender norms and rejecting openly gay
men and women. Men, the group’s decision makers, “headed” their wives.
Justice
Barrett said then that she would not impose her personal beliefs on the
country. “Judges can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I have an agenda — I like
guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion’ — and walk in like a royal
queen and impose their will on the world,” she said amicably. “It’s not the law
of Amy. It’s the law of the American people.”
Yet
that’s what seems to be coming. Like a royal queen, she will impose her will on
the world. It will be the law of Amy. And Sam. And Clarence. And Neil. And
Brett. It’s outrageous that five or six
people in lifelong unaccountable jobs are about to impose their personal views
on the rest of the country. While they will certainly provide the legal
casuistry for their opinion, let’s not be played for fools: The Supreme Court’s
impending repeal of Roe will be owed to more than judicial argumentation. There
are prior worldviews at work in this upheaval.
As a
Catholic whose father lived through the Irish Catholics “need not apply” era,
I’m happy to see Catholics do well in the world. There is an astonishing
preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court — six out of the nine justices,
and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic and went to the same
Jesuit boys’ high school in a Maryland suburb that Brett Kavanaugh and my
nephews did, Georgetown Prep. My father
was furious that Catholic presidential candidates Al Smith and J.F.K. had to
defend themselves against scurrilous charges that, if they got to the White
House, they would take their orders from the pope.
One must
tread carefully here. A Catholic signed on to the Roe v. Wade decision and
another was in the court majority that upheld it in Planned Parenthood v.
Casey. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Catholic, has expressed support for Roe, and
Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Catholic, may be working for a
compromise decision that can uphold Roe.
Still,
this Catholic feels an intense disquiet that Catholic doctrine may be shaping
(or misshaping) the freedom and the future of millions of women, and men. There
is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that
threatens to turn our whole country upside down.
I come
from a family that hews to the Catholic dictates on abortion, and I respect the
views of my relatives. But it’s hard for me to watch the church trying to
control women’s sexuality after a shocking number of its own priests sexually
assaulted children and teenagers for decades, and got recycled into other
parishes, as the church covered up the whole scandal. It is also hard to see
the church couch its anti-abortion position in the context of caring for women
when it continues to keep women in subservient roles in the church.
Religiosity
is a subject some Catholics on the court have been more open about in recent
years. Last year, at Thomas Aquinas College in California, Justice Samuel
Alito fretted that
there was growing cultural hostility toward Christianity and Catholicism.
“There is a real movement to suppress the expression of anything that opposes
the secular orthodoxy,” he said. Precisely which belief or practice of his
religion does he feel he has been denied? President Biden is a Catholic who is
uncomfortable with the issue of abortion despite his support for Roe. Still,
when Barrett was a law professor at Notre Dame, a group she belonged to
unanimously denounced the
university’s decision to honor Biden even though he didn’t support the church’s
position on abortion.
We have
no one in the public arena like Mario Cuomo, who respected the multiplicity of
values in an open society and had the guts to wade into the lion’s den at
Notre Dame in 1984. “The Catholic who holds political office in a pluralistic
democracy — who is elected to serve Jews and Muslims, atheists and Protestants,
as well as Catholics — bears special responsibility,” Cuomo said. “He or she
undertakes to help create conditions under which all can live with a maximum of
dignity and with a reasonable degree of freedom; where everyone who chooses may
hold beliefs different from specifically Catholic ones — sometimes
contradictory to them; where the laws protect people’s right to divorce, to use
birth control and even to choose abortion.”
The
explosive nature of Alito’s draft opinion on Roe has brought to the fore how
radical the majority on the court is, willing to make
women fit with their zealous worldview — a view most Americans reject. It has
also shown how radical Republicans are; although after pushing for this result
for decades, because it made a good political weapon, they are now pretending
it’s no big deal. We will all have to live with the catastrophic results of
their zealotry.’
Thank you, Ms. Dowd! It requires a Catholic to say this!
JL
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There is only one overriding issue of political concern right now, encompassing much of what appears on this blog. That is how to defeat Republicans on Nov. 8, about 25 weeks from now. The future of democracy in the United States is at stake. Really.
JL
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Hamilton Feared Foreign Influence on our President
Let’s go back to this blog’s posting of Dec. 14, 2016, after the election of the
defeated (in 2020) former president but before his inauguration.
Alexander Hamilton’s words in Federalist Papers
Number 68 discussed the electoral college, the votes of which that defeated
former president tried to change in the insurrection of January 6, 2021, that
he instigated.
Here’s an excerpt from what Hamilton
wrote. Go back and read the whole thing,
or at least its highlighted portions some of which are reproduced below. Hamilton advocated having many members included in the electoral college as a
good thing and the example he cites foreshadows what our 45th president may have succumbed to as developed in the whitewashed Mueller investigation of
the defeated former president. Hamilton wrote:
'Nothing was more to be desired than that every
practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption (be
included in the proposed Constitution?). These most deadly adversaries of republican
government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from
more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an
improper ascendant in our councils. How
could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the
chief magistracy of the Union?’
JL
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