Democrats: "Spare Us the Bullshit About Constitutional Rights"
The contemporary Democrats presume they are made of finer clay and nothing, not even the Constitution, should stand in the way of what they want.
Progressives harangue conservatives for being stodgy, low IQ troglodytes, creatures stuck in a time warp to the past, always trying to drag everybody back there with them. Progressives see them as fantasizing about being plantation owners, wanting to keep women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen and as Biden once said about what conservatives would do to blacks, “they want to put y’all back in chains!”
Conservatives believe progressives are slaves to fad and fashion, disregarding the traditions and social mores that have held society together in favor of the flavor of the month. Conservatives believe the Constitution means nothing to progressives – unless they can twist its plain language into something with which they agree.
So which view is closer to the truth?
Progressives constantly and consistently call conservatives racists, homophobes, bigots, and sexists – most of the time with little to no evidence of conservatives being any of that. It is typical for progressives and their allies to inflate and conflate everything conservatives do and try to force fit conservatives into their idea of what a conservative is.
Modern conservativism is about saving the things necessary to maintain a free society while changing with the times when that change is additive. We believe there are certain transcendental principles that are not subject to whims of the day and those principles must be preserved or nothing else matters.
Our Constitution and the Bill of Rights are two of the basic things that must be preserved. This is perhaps the most instructive when understanding the differences between contemporary conservatives and progressives.
Let’s take a look at some recent Democrat comments about the Constitution and long-standing traditions of our governance:
Mondaire Jones: "You will not stop us from passing it in the House next week and you will not stop us there. If the filibuster obstructs us, we will abolish it. If the Supreme Court objects, we will expand it. And we will not rest until we have taken weapons of war out of circulation in our communities. Each and every day we will do whatever it takes to end gun violence, whatever it takes."
David Cicilline: "Spare me the bullshit about constitutional rights…”
President Joe Biden: “At the same time, the Second Amendment, like all other rights, is not absolute.”
Biden and other Democrats constantly quote Chief Justice Anton Scalia when he wrote in D.C. v Heller that:
“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
As usual, they only quote the parts they like because Scalia went on to say:
“The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster.”
So, under D.C. v Heller, a second attempt to ban “assault weapons” would similarly not meet Constitutional muster.
As a side note, I happen to differ with Justice Scalia on this matter because he contradicts himself in the Heller decision by spending much effort explaining that in his words, “the Constitution says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say” and that, as decided by two prior cases, “[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning” and then rendering a decision that seems to say that maybe the Constitution really didn’t totally mean it when it says a right “shall not be infringed.”
It does not matter what Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg – or Joe Biden for that matter – thought or think about the Second Amendment, the language in the Constitution is clear, unambiguous, and final, stating the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” That is a binary, qualitative statement – the Second Amendment either cannot be infringed or it can. No matter how we may feel about that, pro or con, none of that changes the explicit prohibition in the Constitution about what the government may NOT do.
And yet our various judicial and governmental bodies have been allowed to apply a qualitative standard to the Second Amendment by banning and restricting some forms of weapons while allowing others they deemed to be less problematic at the time.
It should not be lost on anyone that no law prohibiting guns in any “gun free zone” or the express illegality of murder has stopped any person with the intent to kill (with any weapon).
These deviations from Constitutional absolutism are made tangible when Joe Biden constantly says that “no rights are absolute” – the deeper meaning of which is that not just the Second Amendment rights, but NO rights are absolute. Representative Mondaire Jones and David Cicilline agree with the alleged president that no rights are absolute and as a matter of fact, the Constitution should not be allowed to get in the way of what they want to do – they will do “whatever it takes” to stop your “bullshit about constitutional rights”.
We have noted the slight change in the Democrat argument, moving from “assault weapons” to “semiautomatic weapons”, incorporating most handguns. Biden’s ludicrous comparison of a .22 caliber round to a 9mm “high caliber” round capable of literally blowing a lung out of a body is an example of a Freudian slip by a cognitively challenged president that reveals where the conversation within the Democrat Party has gone.
In his letter to Samuel Kercheval, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.”
This is what deviations from the “shall not infringe” and other similar negative prohibitions in the Constitution have wrought.
This isn’t just about the right to bear arms; it is about every God-given right Americans possess.
Democrats reveal who they are every day.
Spare them the Constitutional bullshit they took an oath to protect and defend.
Any "journalist" worth his paycheck would ask this Cicilline clown when his resignation can be expected, having obviously disqualified himself for office by abandoning his oath out loud. But we don't have any of those.
The Spring 2022 edition of the Claremont Review of Books features an interesting essay by William Voegeli, entitled THE RIGHT NOW. It is a thoughtful discussion of the conflicts among Republicans. It compares "Trumpism" to the beliefs of conservatives like George Will and William Kristol. The majority of Republicans now accept the importance of the Progressive Medicare program and Social Security. There is a schism within the GOP, just as has become evident in the Biden/Manchin conflict on the other side.
The article ends with this optimistic paragraph:
"The central conservative impulse is that because valuable things are easy to break but hard to replace, every effort should be made to conserve them while they can be conserved. Conservatives, opposed to assisted suicide as a medical procedure, should be equally reluctant to perform it as a political procedure on a republic that, however debilitated, has time and again proven resilient, confounding those prepared to write its autopsies and deliver its eulogies."
In five months, we will hopefully have elections and in just over seven months, the Progressives will, by and large, be removed from congress. Let us all hope and pray that the courts prevent the Obama/Biden administration from destroying the nation beyond our ability to repair it.