Former SCOTUS justice advises that we "repeal the 2nd amendment"

U.S. Supreme Court Assoc. Justice John Paul Stevens was on the highest court from 1975 until his retirement in 2010, making him the third longest-serving SCOTUS member.    He has remained active in speaking and writing about major issues in our jurisprudence, tending to more liberal positions.   He opposed the Bush v. Gore decision that gave the presidency to George W. Bush.   He also dissented from the Heller decision that defined an individual right to bear arms that has turned gun control into such a hot issue.

One of his recent books (2014) is Six Amendments:   How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.  Yesterday, March 27th, in the wake of the March For Our Lives rallies in DC and across the nation and world, Justice Stevens penned an op-ed for the New York Times, which I find compelling and definitely worth reading:

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"Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.

"That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. 

"But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

"Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that '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.'  Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

"For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a 'well regulated militia.'

"During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.RA.'s . . . [efforts as] one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.'

"In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.

[I inject here that, even the majority opinion's conservative author, Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote that the right was not unlimited, that some restrictions could be placed on the right.--[R]   Back to Steven's op-ed:

"That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

"That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence."

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I was stunned over the weekend by the vehemence of the argument put up by a Republican strategist Rick Tyler, who was a spokesman for the Ted Cruz 2016 campaign;  he later became part of the "Never Trump" group.  He has been a guest on MSNBC and usually gives a rather rational, conservative opinion that I can respect, even when I differ with his policy positions.

But, as the TV anchor tried to get Tyler to state clearly why he was so opposed to any gun regulations, he became agitated, irrational, and just kept interrupting and insisting that it's about "second amendment rights" -- as though that is literally an immutable thing, rather than something to be discussed.    He is someone I would have thought you could have a rational discussion with;   but on this occasion, anyway, that was literally impossible.

I'm with Justice Stevens.    The second amendment, at least the part about militas and guns, is a pure anachronism.    I still like my solution, which I've espoused on here before:    OK.   Let's stipulate the individual right to bears arms -- but limited to the type of guns that were available when the 2nd amendment was adopted.

That would be muzzle-loading muskets that fire one shot at the time, with rather time-consuming reloading procedures, including pouring in gun powder, adding the lead shot, then stuffing bits of cotton or cloth to keep it in.    At least we'd have no shooting of 17 or 36 people before anybody can do anything about it.

Let's go with repeal of the amendment, as well.

Ralph

PS:   After finishing this, I saw a response from Harvard Law Professor and constitutional expert Laurence Tribe, who said that Stevens may be right about it being "simple" as a legal remedy;  but repealing a piece of the Constitution is far from simple as a political endeavor.   It would require a super-majority approval by both Houses of' Congress and then ratification by voters in three-fourth of the states.   So as a practical matter, it's not likely to happen.

Good for you, Melania

Melania Trump rose above it all Sunday night.   Shortly after the CNN "60 Minutes" interview by Anderson Cooper with Stormy Daniels, Melania released this statement:

"While I know the media is enjoying speculation and salacious gossip, I'd like to remind people there's a minor child whose name should be kept out of news stories when at all possible."

Classy.    Not hiding and pretending to ignore.   Not playing victim.  Instead, she's being the strong protector of the son that her husband's behavior puts in such a position.  Just like choosing cyber-bullying as her First Lady project.  The perfect issue for the wife of such a bully.

Ralph

Abusing power, degrading democracy

Dylan Matthews on Vox.com reports this about Stormy Daniels, Trump, and the cover-up as discussed on CNN by Anderson Cooper and Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti:

Matthews writes:
   "I don't care if Donald Trump had consensual sex with a woman other than his wife;  that's a matter for him and Melania to handle privately.   What I do care about is that the President is a bully, who attempts to silence through money and intimidation, anyone (but particularly women) who stands between him and what he wants.

   "This is about abuse of power, pure and simple, a point that Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, makes extremely well in his own interview with "60 Minutes'" anchor Anderson Cooper.

COOPER:  'There are people who argue that this is much ado about nothing, that if this was not a story about an adult film actress and the President of the United States, no one would pay attention.'
AVENATTI:   'This is about the cover-up.  This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb.  It is thuggish behavior from people in power.  And it has no place in American democracy.'

Back to Matthews:
   "Avenatti is exactly right:   this is about the cover-up.  It's about the fact that Trump was willing to exploit his money and power to intimidate Daniels, through agents like his longtime attorney Michael Cohen.   And it's about the entitlement that lets him justify that behavior to himself."

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Is anyone surprised by the picture of Donald Trump that Daniels' encounter paints?   Will anyone be swayed by it in their political support for Trump?

The answer to both questions is what is shocking to me.   For anyone willing to see, Donald Trump has telegraphed -- even rubbed our noses in -- this image of him all along.    What is shocking is how many people really do not care -- and that tells us just how degraded we have allowed our democratic institutions, and those who hold offices, to become.

Ralph

NRA reacts like a scared bully

Until the day of the March For Our Lives rallies in hundreds of cities around the world, with 800,000 in Washington, DC, the National Rifle Association had remained relatively silent about the big day.

And then the NRA unloaded -- with mocking, sarcasm, lies -- and they used it as a membership drive impetus.  Calling it a "carnival" atmosphere, the NRA posted this call for new members on Facebook:

"Today's protests aren't spontaneous. . .  Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones."

It's true that some media stars (like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey) have donated a lot of money to help pay for the expenses of organizing these rallies and providing entertainment;  but it is a bald-faced lie to claim that these kids are being manipulated or, for that matter, trying to destroy the second amendment.  That's not even mentioned on their agenda.

If the Parkland kids are trying to destroy the second amendment, then so was Justice Antonin Scalia, the legal-eagle hero of conservatives.  When he wrote the majority opinion that defined it as an individual right "to bear arms," he also said in that opinion that the right is not absolute.  He said that limits may be placed on what weapons may be purchased by private individuals.  That's all the kids are demanding.

Wayne LaPierre himself should sit down with some of them, listen to them . . . and then make up his mind.    I'd put them up against any honest promoter and activist for a good cause.   The NPR is the manipulator here -- using tragedy to increase the sale of guns for its financial backers in the gun industry.   The more they can scare people with lies, the more guns get sold.

Let's see who wins in the voting booths in November.  That's what counts;  and the kids know it.   You better believe they know it, and that's where their long-range focus is.   That's why the NRA is running scared.

Ralph

Emma Gonzalez

                            photo by:   Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images

One of the leaders of that extraordinary group of activist-teens from the Parkland, Florida high school is Emma Gonzalez, shown here at the Washington rally.

Emma began by describing what it was like during those "long, tearful, chaotic hours in the scorching afternoon sun . . . not knowing.  No one understood the extend of what had happened. . . . No one knew that the people who had gone missing had stopped breathing long before any of us had even known that a code red had been called."

Emma then read the names of the victjms and talked about the things they would never do again.   And then she did a remarkable thing.   She simply stood in silence.

And she stood there, silent herself, at the podium, and held the crowd in the palm of her silence . . .  for a full six minutes and 20 seconds.   Because that's the length of time that the shooting lasted. 

Incredible.   It's difficult to have even a full minute of silence in a crowd.  But this was intense and powerful.   Here are some reactions from social media posted during the silence:

Elizabeth West (limeylizzie):   "The power of silence is so underestimated.   Emma is holding this crowd in the palm of her hand."
     
Dave (D_opus):  "Amen.  I can't stay silent for more than 30 seconds usually.  Emma is an amazing young woman."

JeffSand (jsand42):  "Brave girl.  Powerful speech.  Congrats on the rally."

Ishmail (imadni):   "Emma is right now exhibiting incredible power."

AJ (AlissaJass):   "Without saying a word.   Emma is a special soul."

Ralph

Protests against gun violence in schools -- and politicians who do nothing about it

Led by the impressively mature and expressive teenage survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that killed 17, hundreds of thousands of young people and their supporters took to the streets in peaceful protest Saturday, calling for "common sense gun control laws."

The largest crowd was in Washington, D.C., but tens of thousands also rallied in other cities around the world, with over a million total anticipated at some 800 rallies worldwide,

The National Rifle Association and politicians whose silence is bought by them were the main targets.  One of the hallmarks of these young activists is that they are articulate, intelligent, savvy about government and politics -- and they are also practical.

They are not calling for banning all guns;  there is no hysteria in their tone --  only sorrow and determination to get something done.  They're demanding universal background checks that work, raising the age for gun purchases, and a ban on assault-type rifles and high capacity magazines.

One of the most effective rhetorical flourishes in the many, brief speeches given by these young people was the repetition of a demand for action from politicians, followed by the promise that non-action will have consequences:  "We will vote you out."   It became a chant from the crowd:  "Vote them out."  

Other notable rallying cries were:  "Why do your guns matter more than our lives?" and "Our ballots will stop bullets."  In fact, a major focus of these rallies is registering young people and others to vote.   And, for those not yet 18, work to get others to vote.

The White House put out a rather generic statement offering support to the students, without being critical of the NRA or politicians.   But it was not from the president, himself;  as of early evening he had made no comment.  He is spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago and went golfing Saturday morning, according to the Associated Press.

Not surprising, not at all.

Ralph

"Trump hacked the media before our eyes" -- Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat, conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times called his Wednesday column "Trump Hacked the Media Before Our Eyes" to call attention to the fact that all the excitement about the "confessions" of a Cambridge Analytica official is really old stuff.   Trump has been doing it for years, just in a different way and without all the digital data.  Douthat writes:

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"Let's get one thing straight:  I am not a fan of Facebook.  I'm confident that social media is a cancer on our private lives and a source of derangement in our politics.  I take it for granted that the tech barons are acquiring the power to tilt elections, and that they'll be happy to play handmaidens to tyrants soft and hard so long as they can monetize our data. . . . 

"But the liberal establishment's fixation on Facebook's 2016 sins -- first the transmission of fake news and now the exploitation of its data by the Trump campaign or its appendages . . . still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it's new when it's the old thing that mattered more. . . .  

"No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook's data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump's surprise victory.   But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn't Zuckerberg's unreal kingdon;  it wasn't even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily.  It was the old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news.

"Start with the fake news that laid the foundation for Trump's presidential campaign -- not the sort that circulates under clickbait headlines in your Facebook feed, but the sort broadcast in prime time by NBC, under the label of reality TV.   Yes, as media sophisticates we're all supposed to know that 'reality' means 'fake.' but in the beginning nobody marketed 'The Apprentice' that way;  across most of its run you saw a much-bankrupted real estate tycoon portrayed, week after week and season after season, as a titan of industry, the for-serious greatest businessman in the world.

"Where did so many people originally get the idea that Trump was the right guy to fix our manifestly broken government?   Not from Russian bots or targeted social media ad buys, but from a prime-time show that sold itself as real, and sold him as a business genius.

"Forget unhappy blue collar heartlanders, forget white nationalists and birthers.  The core Trump demographic might just have been Republicans who watched 'The Apprentice,' who bought the fake news that his television program and its network sponsors gladly sold them.

"That was step one in the Trump hack of television media.  Step two was the use of his celebrity to turn news channels into infomercials for his campaign.   Yes, his fame also boosted him on social media, but there you can partially blame algorithms and the unwisdom of crowds;  with television news there were actual human beings charged with exercising news judgment and inclined to posture as civic-minded actors when it suits them, making the decisions to hand day after day of free coverage to Donald Trump's rallies.

"Nothing that Cambridge Analytica did to help the Trump campaign target swing voters (and there's reason to think it didn't do as much as it claimed) had anything remotely like the impact of this #alwaysTrump tsunami, which probably added up to more than $2 billion in effective advertising for his campaign during the primary season, a flood that drowned all of his rivals' pathetic tens of millions.

"And as cynical as I believe the lords of Silicon Valley to be, the more important cynicism in 2016 belonged to those television execs who were fine with enabling the wild Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P., because after all Republicans deserved it and Hillary was sure to beat him in the end.

"Except that she didn't beat him, in part because he also exploited the polarization that cable news, in particular, is designed to feed.   In 2016 this polarization didn't just mean that Fox became steadily more pro-Trump as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals;  it also meant that a network like CNN, which thrives on Team Red vs. Team Blue conflict, felt compelled to turn airtime over to Trump surrogates like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany because their regular stable of conservatives (I was one of them) simply wasn't pro-Trump enough.

"The depth and breadth of Trump skepticism among right-wing pundits was a pretty solid indicator of his unfitness for high office.  But especially once he won the nomination this skepticism was often filtered out of cable coverage, because the important thing was to maintain the partisan shouting-match model.   This in turn encouraged a sense that this was just a typical right-versus-left election, in which you should vote for Trump if you usually voted for Republicans . . . and in the end that's what most G.O.P. voters did. . . . 

"[T]he business-model of our news channels both assumes and heightens polarization . . . .  it was ripe for exploitation by a demagogue who was also a celebrity. . . . 

"It's also clear . . . . that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news.

". . . . In a sense, you could argue all those tweets matter mainly because they kept being quoted on TV.

"Which is not to say that the current freakout over Facebook doesn't make a certain kind of sense.   Beyond the psychological satisfaction of weaving the often-genuinely-sinister side of Silicon Valley into stolen-election theories, there's a strategic wisdom to the center-left establishment's focus on the internet.

"What Trump did will be hard for a future demagogue to imitate.   The generations who get their information from newscasts are dying out, the web is taking over at an accelerating pace and in the long run there is more to be gained in going after Mark Zuckerberg than in pillorying Jeff Zucker [head of NBC?]

"And pilloring Fox's hosts only helps their brand:  the big tech companies regard themselves as part of the liberal cultural complex, so they're vulnerable  to progressive bullying and shaming;  not so Sean Hannity, whose stalwart support for Trump was and remains vastly more important than any online strategem.

"In the end, as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently for National Review, one implicit goal of the Facebook freakout is to ensure that 'conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.'  If the trauma of Trump's victory turns social-media gatekeepers into more aggressive and self-conscious stewards of the liberal consensus, the current freakout will have more than served its political purpose.

"But like the television channels whose programming choices did far more than Facebook to make Donald Trump president, it won't have served the truth."

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It's important to understand what happened that gave us Trump;  but, as Douthart rightly points out, by the 2020 election things will have changed significantly -- and certainly by 2024.    AND we'll never again (let's hope) have the peculiar combination of Donald Trump's television celebrity and fake reputation as a business genius, plus an older white majority fascinated by that repugnant combination.

At least let us hope this is a one-time, grossly unique phenomena.

Ralph