14 GOP Senators voted for gun-grab
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. – Art. 1, Sect. 9, Clause 3
The Friday Letter / No 498 / June 24, 2022
Just a day before the Supreme Court affirmed Second Amendment rights in New York, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have collaborated on a new gun control bill that would allow police to confiscate weapons of anyone accused of posing a threat.
The so-named red flag provision for the first time would empower authorities to confiscate firearms even when a gun owner has not been charged with a crime, strictly on the accusation of anyone who wishes to lodge a complaint. If passed, this part of the bill would constitute what the Founders called a Bill of Pains and Penalties, similar to a Bill of Attainder for treason and other capital cases, and is unconstitutional.
The latest gun-grab bill is likely what Justice Joseph Story had in mind in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. “. . .In all such cases,” he wrote, “the legislature exercises the highest power of sovereignty, and what may be properly deemed an irresponsible despotic discretion, being governed solely by what it deems political necessity or expediency, and too often under the influence of unreasonable fears, or unfounded suspicions.”
Two Supreme Court rulings affirm the Pains and Penalties clause. “The prohibition embodied in this clause is not to be narrowly construed in the context of traditional forms but is to be interpreted in accordance with the designs of the framers so as to preclude trial by legislature, which would violate the separation of powers,” the Court wrote in United States v. Brown (1965).
In United States v. Lovett (1946), the Court ruled that the clause prohibits all legislative acts, “no matter what their form, that apply either to named individuals or to easily ascertainable members of a group in such a way as to inflict punishment on them without a judicial trial. . .”
Other provisions in the so-named Gun Safety Bill are only slightly less noxious. If the SCOTUS decision handed down Thursday is any indication, the red flag clause at a minimum should be quickly delegated to the legislative dumpster.
Here are the 14 Republican Senators who are going along with Democrats to strip the 2nd Amendment. Note that retiring (thankfully) Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania supports the bill but did not vote.
John Cornyn, Texas
Mitch McConnell, Kentucky
Thom Tillis, North Carolina
Susan Collins, Maine
Lindsey Graham, South Carolina
Bill Cassidy, Louisiana
Roy Blunt, Missouri
Richard Burr, North Carolina
Mitt Romney, Utah
Rob Portman, Ohio
Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia
Joni Ernst, Iowa
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska
Todd Young, Indiana
Bold: Running for re-election in 2022.
Speech isn't free, so what's your point?
I must admit disappointment in the poor response to our comparison last week of how the medieval church and our current government maintain control of the common people by denying their right of free speech. This right is fundamental to our survival as a free society. I fear that not enough of us are concerned that James Madison put freedom of expression first on the list of our God-given rights, rights that cannot be repealed by dictators.
Our future needs rising generations to understand how our freedoms came about, granted by God but forced upon the rulers by the brave souls who risked everything. It struck me as eery that the medieval Catholic Church controlled its subjects in manners that are frighteningly occurring today, here in America. Your children do not learn these lessons in school.
While Joe Biden's Justice Department isn't burning heretics at the stake, it is allowing its political prisoners to languish in jail without trial or bail. It wages war on prior administration officials while allowing violent “mostly peaceful” criminals to walk free without so much as a jaywalking citation.
Our readers' reaction was one giant yawn. Last week's Friday Letter got near the lowest readership, with the fewest forwards and shares, and the fewest comments, of any this year. This is disappointing, for if we can't help our younger generations understand the importance of our freedoms, we have little purpose. Merely regurgitating the news serves no purpose.
Our nation's future depends on well-read, informed, active citizens, whether they have a college degree or a welding certificate, conduct biomedical research or drive delivery trucks, fly jetliners or clean hotel rooms. Self-education is available free to everyone, at libraries, from colleges like Hillsdale and from Kahn Academy, Prager U, through the study of our founding documents, by reading C.S. Lewis and Tocqueville, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, Edmund Burke and Frederick Douglass, F.A. Hayek, and the Great Books of the Western World. (Western. Oh no! Racist!) Many of these have been banned from college and public libraries (explanation: hate speech).
(Our local library has a book glorifying violent felon George Floyd and a couple on how Donald Trump tried to “steal” the 2020 election, but not Ryan Anderson's When Harry Became Sally <available at Thriftbooks but banned at Amazon>, or Mollie Hemingway's Rigged.)
And people who consider themselves well-informed by watching cable TV celebrities endlessly hawk their ghost-written books are poorly informed at best, I hate to tell them. An educated person – of any level of formal schooling – is one who reads thoughtful writing, both classic and contemporary. Reading is not defined here as the casual absorption of tweets and Instagram bombs.
It also requires thoughtful consideration of ideas that may not comport with our biases. I read some of Margaret Atwood even though I don't share her political views. I have read Ayn Rand even though she is an atheist and I am not. It isn't possible to overstate the importance of considering different viewpoints, because most colleges today offer only one viewpoint, and to pass, students must at least pretend like they accept the Marxist, twisted, one-sided views of their professors. This is not education. This is indoctrination.
Just stroll through the pages of Campus Reform for an idea of what happens to students and professors who dare challenge the company line: expulsions, terminations, ostracism, criminal charges.
At American Greatness, Jack Kerwick explains why merely voting for Republicans won't solve our nation's problems. In “So, Why, Exactly, Should We Vote Republican?” Kerwick challenges patriot voters to be more thoughtful when they choose their leaders. That's an understatement – worthy of serious consideration, agree or disagree.
'Insurrection' farce update
Biden's Justice Department enforcers apparently are too busy setting up President Trump for trial and imprisonment to bring charges against a congressional aide who was caught defacing posters outside the Capitol office of GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green. “But the same U.S. Attorney's office that pursued the Jan. 6 defendants declined to approve an arrest warrant,” Just the News reports.
Capitol Police sought an arrest warrant in March for Timothy Hysom, chief of staff to Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts. Federal prosecutors denied the request. Auchincloss aides were responsible for allowing protesters working for leftist activist and former comedian Stephen Colbert into the Longworth House office building last Thursday. Seven were arrested and briefly detained. They were not given the same treatment as protesters who entered (and some who did not) the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Some of those defendants are still locked in solitary confinement in the D.C. gulag, without trial and denied bail.
Election fraud update
The evidence is mounting that Trump may have won Georgia's 16 electoral votes in 2020. In addition to nearly 35,000 Georgians who voted illegally, The Federalist reports, video evidence shows counterfeit ballots being stuffed into unattended drop boxes. Trump also accused Dominion Voting Systems of flipping votes from him to Biden. The reported official tally gave Biden an 11,779-vote margin.
Short takes on the news
Catholic Vote has tracked 29 attacks on pregnancy centers since the Supreme Court's leaked hint that it may overturn Roe v. Wade. Arrests: none. No reaction to the violence has come from the Biden Administration, its Justice Department and FBI political enforcement arms, or Democrat congressional leaders. . .
Gun control at work. Two teenaged home invasion apprentices were terminated from the program when they unwisely targeted a man who had perfect aim with his handgun. The boys, 15 and 16, attacked the homeowner in his East Hartford living room, and he shot both of them. They died at a local hospital, Fox 61 TV in Hartford reports.
Connecticut does not have a “stand your ground” law, which means that a homeowner may not protect his property and life unless under active attack, so it's yet to be seen if the homeowner will be charged. East Hartford police are not inclined to think so.
The Hartford Public Schools were quick to express sympathy – for the dead criminal home invaders, not the home invasion victim. An excerpt from its statement:
“This is an unfortunate and tragic incident, and we are deeply saddened by the loss of members of our Hartford Public Schools community. We are prepared to provide proper support and resources for students and staff affected by this tragedy. Our thoughts are with our former students’ families, friends, and loved ones during this difficult time” . . .
When cooler heads prevail. We find it easy to get all worked up when some lefty-lib introduces a gun-grab bill or other legislation to repeal our freedoms. And so the BP meter shot skyward when we learned that a Texas legislator introduced a bill to make you a criminal if you protect yourself from armed home invaders unless you can prove you had no other choice.
To the bill's sponsor Terry Meza, who represents Irving in the Texas House, there is always the choice to run away, as the bill's language explains, because “the homeowner's obligation is to flee the home at the first sign of intrusion. If fleeing is not possible, he must cooperate with the intruder. . . If violence breaks out it is the homeowner's responsibility to make sure no one gets hurt.”
This story has been flying around the Internet for some time now, and we were curious to know more. You can put this one to rest. Terry's bill, introduced in 2020, died a well-deserved death on May 31, 2001, in the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.
Did we forget to mention that Terry is a Democrat, and a lawyer? Did you know she's a big fan of the diversity and inclusion racket? You probably guessed that already. Don't mess with Texas. . .
Armed federal agents from the Biden Justice Department staged a Soviet-style pre-dawn raid Wednesday on the home of a Trump DOJ official, the only one who wanted to to investigate credible allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, American Greatness reports. Jeffrey Clark was acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Division under Trump.
The raid gives ammunition to the growing belief that DOJ is a political enforcement arm of the Democrat Party.
“The new era of criminalizing politics is worsening in the US. Yesterday more than a dozen DOJ law enforcement officials searched Jeff Clark’s house in a pre-dawn raid, put him in the streets in his pajamas, and took his electronic devices,” said Russ Vought, former Office of Management and Budget director and president of the Center for Renewing America, where Clark is a fellow.
Lessons in media dishonesty
Here is the lede of a Reuters story:
“WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) – The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide in the coming weeks whether to dramatically curb abortion rights when it rules on a case from Mississippi, potentially paving the way to about half of the 50 U.S. states banning or heavily restricting the procedure.”
The truth is that the Supreme Court's long-awaited decision on Roe v. Wade will have nothing to do with curbing abortion rights. If Roe is overturned, abortion law will be determined by the states and their legislatures, as the 10th Amendment to the Constitution requires, not by the Supreme Court.
Here they go again. We noted last week that journalists seem unable to use the word conservative as a single four-syllable word but must use it as part of “conservative firebrand.” Never mind that Mo Brooks is a pretty soft-spoken fellow. Because he supports President Trump, he's automatically a firebrand.
For background, Congressman Brooks of Alabama lost his primary election runoff for the U.S. Senate to Katie Britt, whose campaign was fueled by millions of dollars from out-of-state, anti-Trump establishment Republican political action committees that masqueraded as conservative Alabama organizations. (Oddly, Trump endorsed Britt.)
“The loss ends a turbulent campaign for Brooks, a conservative firebrand who had fully embraced Trump’s election lies and had run under the banner MAGA Mo,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday night. “Trump initially endorsed Brooks in the spring of 2021, rewarding an ardent champion of his baseless claims of a stolen election. Brooks had voted against certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory and delivered a fiery speech at the rally before the U.S. Capitol insurrection.”
This story ran under an Associated Press byline at The New York Post Tuesday night. At one point the Post ran the same story under one of its reporter's bylines. Whatever, this is what the AP and newspaper editors call reporting. It is not reporting. It is what we now call journalism. For only a journalist could plant this many falsehoods in so few words, to wit: Trump did not tell election lies. He did not make baseless claims, and the January 6 demonstrations were not an insurrection.
Recommended reading
“The Selfish Californian”
Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness
California can look to its years of progressive, one-party government, its welcoming arms to decades of illegal immigration, and running off the productive middle class for what Hanson calls its implosion. He says the biggest culprit is Big Tech.
“Unimaginable sums of market capital warped politics and led to a top-down, feudal society, run by progressive elites who are shielded from the ramifications of their own toxic ideologies,” he writes at American Greatness. “The common denominator was the emergence in California of a selfish, monied, left-wing political class. In concrete terms, it cared little for others but masked that unconcern with abstract leftism, emulating medieval penance and indulgences to assuage guilt over its enjoyment of sheltered and very good lives.”
“Our Litigious Aspiring Immigrants vs. America”
Brian Lonergan at American Greatness
“Despite their portrayal in the corporate media as low-educated and easily victimized but, somehow, perpetually honorable,” Lonergan begins, “the manual laborers often seeking entry into our country turn out to be more savvy about American ways than the narrative would have you believe. When the few immigration laws that are still enforced prevent them from entering America, the obvious thing to do is to file a lawsuit – against America.”
Lonergan traces the modern history of immigration procedures, to a time where would-be illegals were turned back at the border. Now thanks to “well-funded anti-borders law firms,” illegally invading the country “is merely the first act in a potentially years-long litigation process until the desired result is obtained.” The process is made easier by a compliant White House and Congress.