"Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation."
It occurs to me that I haven't posted a photo here in a couple days. Here's the view of the lovely grey gloom out off the office porch.
Warm, birds singing, a solid overcast at about 2,500 feet with rain in the forecast. A perfect day to crawl back into the Columbia after a month off and fly it back to ELM from BGM after work today, the annual finally finished. We'll see if Paxlovid affects one's ability to shoot an instrument approach, I guess.
This morning began with me shuffling down the hall to turn on the coffee machine, pondering what it might feel like not to always have a deadline or some next event in some client's struggles hanging over my head, all the time. The fantasy of descending the stairs with no brief due on Wednesday, no depositions in two different cities next week, no trial prep or constant backlog of motions to be drafted and argued; for a step or two, I started to feel good. Then reality returned.
I'm defending depositions in about a half-hour. Here we go again. And the other side has already started RFing me by not preloading their exhibits for this virtual deposition, probably at the behest of their horrid bank client that seems to take the RF (that would be "rat f*ck", for you civilians) as a standard litigation tactic. Welcome to my world.
Okay, they just emailed that there would be no exhibits. These are two of my favorite lawyers, hell favorite people, in all of Bay County. I didn't want to believe they'd do something like that.
Turning to the papers, the NYT was filled with sunny editorials about the utter hopelessness of our current situation as it pertains to guns and, well, just about everything else a functioning republic should be able to manage. As one writer observed, "Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it."
Nope. It's as if acknowledging the federal government is dead except as a military organization is to somehow admit defeat.
But maybe it's just the tonic to reinvigorate the discussion, to give people hope that the most benighted of our neighbors in this confederacy of states should not be allowed to dictate policy to the majority.
We've already seen this in a couple other arenas. California became tired of waiting for the rest of the country to get with the program regarding motor vehicle emissions, and created its own body of laws. If you'd lived in Southern California as I did in the 1970s as a child, you'd understand why they thought this was necessary. We rarely saw the mountains through the red haze, KFI Los Angeles regularly broadcast "smog alerts" when it wasn't safe to exert oneself outside, and we sixth-graders would routinely find ourselves wheezing and gasping if we frolicked in the pool on one of those days.
When California acted alone, the auto industry puled about the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, said meeting the new standards wasn't feasible, said the cost would be prohibitive . . .
And then they just complied. You can see the mountains in L.A. now. Deciding to resolve their own problems worked for Californians.
Then there was cannabis. Possession is still a federal crime, but the states made their own decisions about how to handle the issue, and the feds stepped aside. Weed doesn't do it for me, but it's basically harmless and a lot less prone to driving folks to violence and irresponsible behavior than alcohol (you never see a t-shirt that reads, "Hold my joint and watch this"). The states simply went their own way.
So why not guns? The Supremes are apparently on the cusp of striking down New York's fairly rational concealed carry laws.
The law in question is a century old, a reminder that this court is more revanchist and reactionary than conservative in the traditional sense.
Which brings us to the nut of the thing, the Second Amendment, the only amendment that truly matters in the neo-Confederacy. We stand in front of a pile of dead schoolchildren and grocery store shoppers and warehouse employees, all shot dead with weapons that are easier to obtain than a driver's license, and are told there's nothing that can be done because Madison and Jay and Hamilton thought this all through in the age of the muzzle loading musket, and the law can't be touched.
But it can be ignored. Really. When it comes to the Supreme Court, one could ask the same question of its ability to enforce its mandates as Stalin asked regarding the Pope: "The pope! How many divisions has he got?”
If New York were to simply ignore a ruling that struck down a gun law on constitutional grounds, what then? Would the military invade the Empire State? Probably not--the same Constitution appears to proscribe that. Would the goon squad Desantis has promised to raise to enforce his dystopian new society in Florida show up? I doubt their 1997 F-150 pickups could make it this far. Simply put, New York can do whatever it damn well wants, as can any other state.
And that, friends, would be the beginning of the end. But maybe that ending is better than being trapped in a hopeless present, in which the structural compromises of 1787 guaranty that a privileged few dictate the rights of an ever-increasing, economically and politically disenfranchised majority.
Chief Justice Roberts gets it, I think, gets the fact that the Court's role since Marbury is now being called into question as it seems on a path of radical reconsideration of rights we've all assumed we understood for a long time. I just don't think he can do much about it, surrounded by Trump's hand-picked jurists.
So maybe we're better off ignoring them. At least no one will bother picketing their homes. Maybe they'll be just as happy, and we can quit cringing helplessly at every avoidable disaster foisted on us by an overly empowered minority.
Comments