Guns but not votes: Republican fealty to the constitution is completely one-eyed

 

Guns but not votes: Republican fealty to the constitution is completely one-eyed

Lloyd Green

When Republicans want to make it tougher to vote than to purchase a gun, something is definitely off-kilter

 

Wed 24 Mar 2021 12.55 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/24/republicans-guns-votes-constitution-freedom

 

On Monday, a lone gunman killed 10 at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket. Last week, a 21-year-old man killed eight in an Atlanta massage parlor. Faced with calls for heightened background checks on gun sales, Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming’s junior senator, draped herself in the flag, and lashed out at proponents of gun control as essentially un-American.

 

In her words, “every time that there’s an incident like this, the people who don’t want to protect the second amendment use it as an excuse to further erode second amendment rights.” To be sure, Lummis’s fealty to freedom and the constitution is selective at best, and she’s far from alone.

 

Whose rights are purportedly being trampled has a direct relationship to indignation. When it comes to free speech and voting, conservatives have an easy time turning a blind eye – as Lummis, Laurence Silberman, an intermediate appellate federal judge, and Greg Gianforte, Montana’s newly elected governor, can all attest.

 

In the aftermath of the Trump-triggered insurrection, Lummis voted against certifying Pennsylvania’s results for Joe Biden. As she framed things, “I have serious concerns about election integrity, especially in Pennsylvania.”

 

“Concerns” are one thing, reality is something else.

 

Sidney Powell, mistress of the Kraken, failed fabulist and former Trump lawyer recently acknowledged, “no reasonable person would” believe her comments “were truly statements of fact”. Now she tells us.

 

Meanwhile, in a dissenting opinion issued last week in a libel case, Judge Silberman, a Reagan appointee to the DC circuit, let it be known that the press was enjoying too much freedom. And because the media was now overrun with pointy-headed liberals, the US supreme court’s 9-0 1964 ruling in New York Times v Sullivan, a landmark ruling on press freedoms, needed to be undone.

 

Whose rights are purportedly being trampled has a direct relationship to indignation

In his view, public figures facing off against the press should be aided by a lower burden of proof. They would no longer need to demonstrate “actual malice”. The fact that nearly a half-century had passed since the high court’s decision in Sullivan meant nothing to Silberman.

 

As he saw it, “the increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions.” Fox’s ratings and the sway of the Wall Street Journal editorial page were seemingly irrelevant.

 

Indeed, he also managed to lay the blame at America’s universities, writing: “The reasons for press bias are too complicated to address here. But they surely relate to bias at academic institutions.” Said differently, cancel culture is about the other guy.

 

Conveniently, Silberman’s dissent omitted the fact that the Reagan administration gutted the fairness doctrine, which mandated that both sides be heard on the airwaves over controversial issues. In other words, free markets are to be worshipped until they aren’t. Heads my side wins, tails your side loses.

 

Regardless, conservatives judges were not supposed to legislate from the bench or look to social policy in reaching decisions. In Confirmation Bias, an examination of Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation from the same court on which Silberman still sits, conservative talking heads Carrie Severino and Mollie Hemingway trashed Brown v Board of Education, the landmark supreme court ruling that banished as unconstitutional the ugly doctrine of “separate but equal”.

 

According to them, social science wrongly played a role in the court’s calculus. The duo declared that such decisions “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”. Notice the word “may”.

 

And then there’s Montana’s Gianforte – Senator Lummis’s figurative neighbor from one state over. In the middle a 2017 special election for Congress, he body-slammed Ben Jacobs – then with the Guardian – for simply being a reporter.

 

As for the Republican response, the 45th president told an approving crowd: “Greg is smart. And by the way, never wrestle him. You understand. Never.”

 

Which brings us back to guns and the constitution. Recent supreme court decisions make clear that the second amendment secures certain gun rights. While the scope of those protections remains undecided, courts have sustained prohibitions that preclude convicted felons from purchasing guns. As for laws restricting openly carrying weapons, the courts are divided.

 

Regardless, when Republicans want to make it tougher to vote than to purchase a gun, something is definitely off-kilter. The shooter in Georgia had an easier time buying his weapon of choice than the state’s voters will face if the Republican-controlled legislature has its way. Sometimes “freedom” sounds one-sided. Imagine that.