Tag Archives: freedom

“New Commitment To, and Connection With, Each Other”

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That’s what Ana Palacio, Spanish Foreign Minister at the turn of the century, disingenuously claims is needed in Spain following the recent Catalan separation referendum.

Spaniards need to work toward a new commitment to, and connection with, each other and the constitutional system.

But apparently Catalans are not Spaniards according to Palacio, since she also insists

“Dialogue”…is pointless given that Catalan secessionist authorities refuse to live up to or even recognize their responsibilities under the law.

This, in the face of Madrid’s conscious decision to try to suppress the referendum with violence—almost 900 Spanish Guardia– and Policia-inflicted casualties on unarmed Catalans—when, knowing full well that an unhindered referendum would have defeated separatism, Madrid could have arrested the ringleaders peacefully. In fine, Spanish law could have been enforced peacefully; Madrid chose violence.

Responsibilities under law, indeed.

Madrid doesn’t want to work toward a mutual connection; it wants only abject surrender and subjugation of an impertinent population.

Not a Good Sign

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The EU thinks not enough progress has been made on the Brexit talks for there to be any discussion of a post-departure relationship between Great Britain and the rump EU.  You can understand that to mean the Brits haven’t surrendered enough of their nationhood over their effrontery to suit the Poohbahs of Brussels.

Leading lawmakers also slammed continued divisions within the British government over Brexit.

The WSJ piece centered on the Poohbahs’ demands, but the sentence just quoted gives the EU game away.

The “divisions” within the British government are just the noise of liberty and democracy.

Brussels’ plaint, furthermore, comes in an environment in which the EU is demanding that every member state must have the same tax rates, rather than engage in economic competition; member state businesses must be protected from competition by extra-EU businesses through extensively restrictive regulation and the lawfare of bureaucrats like the European Commissioner for Competition; and Poohbah pressure to move to a pan-European government and away from a federation of nations, the first step of which is to create a pan-European budget and tax and lending facilities.

Thus: Brussels’ constant harping in favor of order over the noisiness of democracy is not a good sign for liberty on the European continent.

What’s Their Limiting Principle?

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Progressives, as The Wall Street Journal puts it,

believe that every human problem can be solved with a policy tweak. A ban here, a background check there, and, voila, no more mass shootings.

But what’s their limiting principle?  What level of gun control would satisfy them?  What fundamental concept would make them believe they’ve gone far enough with their tweaks, checks, bans on an American citizen’s access to the means of defending himself and his family?  Besides their empty rhetoric of “I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t take all your guns away…,” I mean.

Some statistics would seem to give the lie to the Progressive-Democrats’ claims both about the ubiquitousness of gun violence and the purpose of these persons’ desired “controls.”

[A] 2015 Congressional Research Service report found that from 1999 to 2013 assault rifles were used in 27% of public mass shootings. The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 killed 32 people with two handguns. FBI statistics show that of 15,070 homicides in 2016, 374 people or 3% were killed with rifles. Some 656 homicides were committed with “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet) and 1,604 with knives.

Guns just aren’t that important to the violence humans commit against each other.  This, in turn, gives that lie to Progressive-Democrats’ claimed goals of merely wanting to “control” our firearms; our use of them is not out of control.

The Left, the Progressive-Democrats, don’t have a limiting principle.  Their tweaks, checks, bans are only first steps.  Their purpose throughout this “debate” is to disarm us completely, so that Government—one of the entities the 2nd Amendment seeks to enable us to defend ourselves against—will have the only guns.

Now, why might that be, exactly?

And this from a different angle on the Left’s desire to disarm us, from Larry O’Connor at Mediaite:

The US government is systemically racist and, through its inaction, seems willing to allow innocent, black citizens to be murdered by its police force. Furthermore, the judicial system is often rigged to protect the evil, racist officers by never punishing them for those murders. Additionally, the very same government is now in the hands of a fascist, incompetent criminal who, not only hates blacks and Latinos so much that he is willing to let the latter die of starvation and thirst [in Puerto Rico] rather than deliver humanitarian aid to them, but also calls the former [NFL player kneelers] “Sons of bitches” for protesting the racist country he oversees….

…if I really thought this country was so evil and so racist…I certainly wouldn’t want that evil, fascist, incompetent, and racist government to determine who could and could not arm themselves.

Why would a thinking American want a Government so evil to have the only guns?

The position on gun control of the Left generally and of the Progressive-Democratic Party in particular not only has no limiting principle, it makes no sense within itself.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall for the Mediaite link.

Gerrymandering and Voting Districts

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Further on the Supreme Court’s considering a Wisconsin gerrymandering case, and that dredges up some thoughts in my pea brain.

Taking the Federal government as my canonical example, I suggest the following to saucer and blow the whole gerrymandering question.  Each State should be divided into squares having substantially equal numbers of citizens resident.  Then, starting with four squares sharing a common corner that is at the geographic center of the State, add squares around the four, building outward in that fashion to the State’s borders, deviating from the square and the square’s straight-line sides only at those borders.

Notice that these squares utterly ignore all demographic considerations beyond the number of citizens resident in the State, the number of Representatives allocated to the State, and the number of citizens resident in each district.  That is, to repeat from my earlier post, what’s specified in the 14th Amendment, Section 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers….

And

…when the right to vote at any election…is denied to any of the male inhabitants…the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens….

That apportionment is according the number of individuals, not to any community, whether urban or rural or neighborhood, nor to ethnicity, political party affiliation, or any other criterion of demography.  In fine, a vote is an individual affair, not a community one, not a collective one, not a party one.  Indeed, further demographic apportion than “citizen” is illegitimate: all Americans are the same in the eyes of the law, and voting is a matter of the supreme Law of the Land.  All voters look alike in the polling station.

Note one more thing: such a district structure—any district structure, whether simple or gerrymandered—is essentially a political decision and so beyond the purview of any court to mandate.  It would be interesting, though, to see lower courts—perhaps a couple of appellate courts—explicitly require squares, anyway.  Such a ruling almost certainly would spark a nationwide political discussion on the matter and on the matter of voter representation generally, culminating in an explicit political decision on the proper way to draw voting districts.

With that decision, the Supreme Court then could declare the matter mooted and forestall a potful of fundamentally (and too often cynically) divisive lawsuits like the present Whitford v Gill, and like Davis v Bandemer, Vieth v Jubelirer, and others before them.

Of course, I believe in the Easter Bunny, too….

Gerrymandering and the Supreme Court

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The Supreme Court has taken up a Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Whitford v Gill, in which some Liberal plaintiffs claim the State’s Republican legislature went too far in gerrymandering the State’s state legislature districts.  The plaintiffs are centering their beef on the idea that Republicans are overrepresented in the State’s legislature compared to State-wide voting tallies; Democrats didn’t get their “fair share” of the seats.

The plaintiffs are targeting Justice Anthony Kennedy in what is likely to be a sharply divided court, and some of Kennedy’s remarks at oral argument are, indeed, troubling.

[A]s Justice Kennedy noted in League of United Latin American Citizens v Perry the Constitution doesn’t require proportional representation, which would mean representation according to voter population.

It’s more than “doesn’t require,” and it’s bothersome that Kennedy seems not to understand this.  The Constitution prohibits proportional representation by requiring equal representation of each citizen.  This is in two Sections of the 14th Amendment.  Section 1 has this on the matter:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Equal representation at the polls is both a matter of privileges and immunities and of equal protection of the laws.  As all citizens are alike in the eyes of the law, so are all members of a subset of citizens—voters—alike at the voting booth.  There can be no other demarcation of voters, one from another, much less one group from another group, and preserve that identity.

Section 2 makes the thing explicit, with the sole modification of the 19th Amendment, which extended the franchise to women:

[W]hen the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

This is the only place where proportionality is permitted, and it’s permitted only in the relation of disenfranchised individuals to the whole of the eligible-to-vote population of individuals.  Party affiliation proportionality, the center of the present case, is both utterly absent in the Constitution and entirely illegitimate as an apportion criterion under the Constitution.

By design.

The Supremes need to uphold Wisconsin’s districts as they currently exist.