Comments (0) Piers Morgan, the British ex pat currently lecturing the USA on its guns laws, is a sometimes Constitutional scholar, or at least he plays on on TV–and on Twitter. To wit:
When our elites are this dense, is there any hope for the rest of us? Jim Treacher thinks not . . . kind of. I mean, after all, David Gregory is a member of the lecturing, hectoring elite class, no? Where will we go for guidance? Oh the humanity. Etc. etc. etc.
First the good news:
Aspirin is a wonder drug, one that virtually all men over 45 and woman over 55 should take to keep the arteries clear and cancer at bay. So says Dr. David Agus, a professor at USC’s medical school, in an Op-ed in today’s New York Times.
Many high-quality research studies have confirmed that the use of aspirin substantially reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease. Indeed, the evidence for this is so abundant and clear that, in 2009, the United States Preventive Services Task Force strongly recommended that men ages 45 to 79, and women ages 55 to 79, take a low-dose aspirin pill daily, with the exception for those who are already at higher risk for gastrointestinal bleeding or who have certain other health issues. (As an anticoagulant, aspirin can increase the risk of bleeding — a serious and potentially deadly issue for some people.)
New reports about aspirin’s benefits in cancer prevention are just as convincing. In 2011, British researchers, analyzing data from some 25,000 patients in eight long-term studies, found that a small, 75-milligram dose of aspirin taken daily for at least five years reduced the risk of dying from common cancers by 21 percent.
Dr. Agus is so excited about aspirin that he argues, “why not make it public policy to encourage middle-aged people to use aspirin?”
Which leads me to the bad news:
Dr. Agus apparently can see no end to such policy initiatives, at least when his money is at risk because of someone else’s bad health practices:
[W]hen does regulating a person’s habits in the name of good health become our moral and social duty? The answer, I suggest, is a two-parter: first, when the scientific data clearly and overwhelmingly demonstrate that one behavior or another can substantially reduce — or, conversely, raise — a person’s risk of disease; and second, when all of us are stuck paying for one another’s medical bills (which is what we do now, by way of Medicare, Medicaid and other taxpayer-financed health care programs).
Now, who can’t see the benefits of everybody eating better, exercising more, and so on? I can. But I can also see a problem here: one man carrying out his duty can easily become another man’s oppressor. And a woman with one finger on the pulse of America and the power to call out the nannys when that pulse rate increases, is likely a woman with too much power.
In Oral Arguments for the recent Obamacare case, Justice Scalia asked Solicitor General Verrilli whether if the government could mandate that we buy health insurance, it could also mandate that we eat broccoli. Supporters of Obamacare laughed at the idea. As James Stewart wrote in The New York Times, in an article titled “Broccoli Mandates and the Commerce Clause,”
The Supreme Court itself has said: “The principal and basic limit on the federal commerce power is that inherent in all Congressional action — the built-in restraints that our system provides through state participation in federal governmental action. The political process ensures that laws that unduly burden the states will not be promulgated.” And absurd bills like a broccoli mandate are likely to fail other constitutional tests. (emphasis supplied)
All I can say in response to that is, “Mr. Stewart, meet Dr. Agus.”
According to Ruthann Robson at Constitutional Law Prof Blog, “For Judge Shubb, because ‘a mental health provider’s pursuit of SOCE [sexual orientation change efforts] is guided by the provider’s or patient’s views of homosexuality, it is difficult, if not impossible, to view the conduct of performing SOCE as anything but integrally intertwined with viewpoints, messages, and expression about homosexuality.’ Thus, Judge Shubb concluded that the statute was undoubtedly subject to strict scrutiny.”
As Ann Althouse–a con law prof at the University of Wisconsin–puts it, “Free speech, an American tradition, inconvenient, as ever, to lawmakers who think they know better than the people who insist on talking about things.”
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit thinks Jason Whitlock should get his facts straight before he aligns the NRA with the KKK. I agree. Another important read on the subject of racism and guns would be Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the case that, along with D.C. v. Heller (2008), finally insured that both federal and state governments must respect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
Thomas devoted a lot of his opinion to recounting the history of guns and slavery in the South, both pre- and post-Civil War. Here’s a taste of what he wrote:
After the Civil War, Southern anxiety about an uprising among the newly freed slaves peaked. As Representative Thaddeus Stevens is reported to have said, “[w]hen it was first proposed to free the slaves, and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble? The prim conservatives, the snobs, and the male waiting-maids in Congress, were in hysterics.” K. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, p. 104 (1965) (hereinafter Era of Reconstruction).
As the Court explains, this fear led to “systematic efforts” in the “old Confederacy” to disarm the more than 180,000 freedmen who had served in the Union Army, as well as other free blacks. See ante, at 23. Some States formally prohibited blacks from possessing firearms. Ante, at 23–24 (quoting 1865 Miss. Laws p. 165, §1, reprinted in 1 Fleming 289). Others enacted legislation prohibiting blacks from carrying firearms without a license, a restriction not imposed on whites. See, e.g., La. Statute of 1865, reprinted in id., at 280. Additionally, “[t]hroughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves.”
Neither the NRA nor gun ownership is racist. Those who would keep guns out of the hands of Otis McDonald and Dick Heller may be however. Otis McDonald is African-American after all.
Yes, I realize that. . . And I understand that . . . as well. Still, this poster is ironic, no?
So what do we learn from the recent Chick-fil-A controversy and protests? Well,we learn that
1. We’ve turned 1/6th of our economy over to people who think it’s fine and dandy to use the considerable power of government to shut down speech they personally don’t approve of;
2. Many on the left has no scruples about maligning the right’s motives;
3. The Tea Party and other like-minded people will be out in force on Election Day (below, the line today at Chick-fil-A in Orem, Utah);
4. And thankfully, some on the left still believe in free speech.
About that free speech thingy, go here and read what the Volokh Conspiracy of law professors has to say about it. Eugene Volokh is one of the nation’s top Constitutional law scholars.
UPDATE: The author of the Facebook rant referred to in #2 pulled his post.
Why does money always get the bad rap, while power–at least the power coveted by those in government–is almost always benign? You know the mantra: If you want to find out who did the dirty deed, it’s always follow the money, never the power. It’s what Woodward claims Deep Throat told him in that garage in Washington D.C., and it’s been repeated ad nauseam ever since. But let me ask you: wouldn’t a quicker route to solving the Watergate mystery have been to follow the power? Who benefited from the break-in? Well, Nixon, of course. And who ended up resigning because of his abuse of power? Nixon again.
Power in government comes almost inevitably to those who first offer you something. They offer to fix your schools. The say they can clean up the environment. Need healthcare? They’re on your doorstep. The list goes on. And yes, they often come through on their offers. We get cleaner water and a safety net. It’s not all bad. Never is. And in any case, your personal cost for anything the offeror does is often obscured by the good deed. But don’t kid yourself; there is a cost. After the transaction, you have less power, and the government that solved (or tried to solve) your problem has more.
In my mind, power is at least as corrupting as money–and in the wrong hands, much more worrisome. For me, the wrong hands are the hands of people I can’t simply walk away from. Thus, though my church may be powerful in some sense, it’s not power I fear because I can walk away from it. Likewise, I’m not too concerned about the power of a G.E. or an ExxonMobile because I can drive across the street and buy from Sears or Texaco. And it’s not power in the hands of the governor or legislature of my state because it’s pretty easy to move to another state.
No, the power I fear most is power in the hands of the federal government because it’s not so easy to leave the United States of America. That takes more money, a passport, and the proper visas. It takes a dislocation of family and friends, of employment, of language, and so on. Besides, if power in the hands of the federal government has reached a point that I would want to move, it’s likely that I may not be able to move in any case.
Now don’t misunderstand; I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that in the U.S. But I do think it’s time to recognize that every time someone in government offers to help us with something in our lives, be it healthcare or soda, the environment or gun violence, we need to ask who really benefits. In other words, we need to follow the power. Almost inevitably, that offer to help results in a loss of my power and an accretion of the power in the hands of the offeror, power in the hands of people and institutions that I cannot walk away from willy nilly.
Don’t believe me? Ask Milton Friedman.
Apparently, the N-word is only offensive and racist if someone on the Right uses it.
Racist, tax, right, wrong. Words just don’t mean what they used to.
From Scalia’s dissent (at page 190 of the opinion), joined by Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas, in the Affordable Care Act case:
The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did
not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a
requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject
to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction
of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly
noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the
Act makes available.The Court regards its strained statutory interpretation
as judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast
judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable
version of health-care regulation that Congress did not
enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment
of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since
Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of
departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions
that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design
will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and
the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements
that may or may not survive the necessary congressional
revision.The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is,
does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional
difficulties. It creates them. . . .
Hurrah for the limits the Court imposed on the Commerce Clause. Boo because the Court struggled so hard to find a tax. Double boo on a Congress that didn’t have the guts to call it a tax in the first place.
I was only vaguely aware that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. From this post on the Volokh Conspiracy, I can see she is someone I should know more about.
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