Tag Archives: Constitution

CO’s Hick Is Running For President

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Caught up in a wave of anti-gun-rights propaganda and irrational sentiment, the Colorado Legislature will vote today on unconstitutional and pointless anti-gun-rights bills. Among the four anti-gun-rights bills are a ban on magazines greater in capacity than 15 rounds and a requirement for criminal background checks even for private transfers of weapons. Of course, these bills will not prevent a single crime or shooting tragedy; they merely criminalize the lives of decent citizens. Further, since the background check bill is patently unenforceable, it is an obvious stepping stone to gun registration, the real goal of anti-gunners. Nobody should be surprised that once the Democrats took all the reins of power in Colorado, they immediately moved to strip citizens of their gun rights as their first priority. Colorado gerrymandering protects some fairly radical leftists who instinctively hate personal responsibility, especially as expressed in the right to self-defense. The surprise is that Gov. “Hick” Hickenlooper plans to sign the transparently fascist bills into law. The best explanation is that Hick is running for President.

Hick, for those outside of Denver, is not an actual hick. He is a former oil man and restaurateur. Personally he is an elitist, arrogant to the point of being funny, and with no interest or sympathy to anyone beyond his political ambitions. He is a serial tax raiser with an extremely leftist and paternal agenda. However, the far-left Denver Post routinely describes him as a “moderate.” Publicly, Hick courts an image that is a mixture of Western style and geeky aw-shucks charm, but he is really an exceptionally driven politician who has always boxed above his weight. Why, then, did he voluntarily stick his nose into a divisive issue that has always proven to be a loser for Democrats, especially in the West?

Colorado is a divided state. Urban centers such as Denver and Boulder are extreme-Left. Few outsiders realize that these cities are as far left as the North East or California. Denver has produced the socialist, and unhinged, Reps. Schroeder and DeGette. Boulder is the home of Ward Churchill, the professor who lied about being Indian and who called the 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” because their work supported the evils of US capitalism. Most of the rest of Colorado is center-right, along with other Western States. State wide elections cannot be won solely with the lunatic-left urban vote, hence CO’s US Senators’ avoiding the gun issue with all their might. Hick, by comparison, initiated the gun debate in CO a few days before the CT tragedy. Hick’s predecessor’s union pandering forced him to not seek a second term, so Hick’s volunteering for the gun debate is curious politics at best. No polling exists, but Hick has probably abandoned an easy reelection for a toss-up against a gun-rights Republican.

Hick does not make these kinds of mistakes, and he has never been so bold about anything other than parking meter fees. Either he has gone crazy hanging-out with Hollywood and Washington leftists, or he has focused his sights outside of Colorado.

The conventional Democrat political wisdom is that the GOP is smashed and irrelevant. True or not, most Dems think the real 2016 Presidential Election is the Democrat primary. The US is lurching hard to the left, and Dems are falling over themselves to repudiate moderates like Pres. Clinton and align with socialists like Pres. Obama. Gov. Cuomo recently signed the most unconstitutional and disturbingly fascist gun law ever. Even GOP pols like Gov. Christie are shifting left, presumably to sail this new wind. These governors are national figures who are quite likely to run for President, so why is a backwater governor of a smallish state following their lead? Hick is aligning with the rest of the hard-left presidential field.

Hick wants to be President. He knows that Western Democrat money and votes for such an enterprise are in short supply, so his politics are mirroring the deep blue states along the coasts. Hick does not care what Coloradans want; he wants to be able to share a pleasant meal with Mayor Bloomberg, the extreme collectivist. Should Hick also come out against the Keystone-XL pipeline, his national ambitions may as well be painted on an Occupy Wall Street banner. Of course, the interests of Coloradans who want to live freely and exercise their natural and constitutional rights are merely stepping stones along his way.

Multiply Liberty By 12

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With Pres. Obama’s declaration of war on liberty (a.k.a. his inaugural address), and with the GOP’s apparent capitulation on taxation and spending, libertarians seem to have little reason to hope. Polls show that as many as one in five Americans hold libertarian views (i.e. the government regulates too much and should not be involved in private moral issues). Why, then, does Washington largely ignore such a large voting block? Why, then, does Washington constantly try to control people’s private lives? The next two to four years look bleak, but a determined minority can check the Left through jury nullification.

If 20% of Americans think the government has gone too far, then nearly 94% of twelve person juries will have at least one liberty minded member. If the government knew that it had only about a 6% chance of convicting a defendant of violating an unjust law, its intrusions would stop.

The US legal system seeks to suppress juries’ right to nullify a law. Jurists are asked to swear an oath to follow the law as written and the judge’s instructions as delivered, but jurists need not ignore the Constitution, natural law, and common sense. The point of the Constitution’s mandate of a jury of peers is to prevent the imposition of imperious dictums and political populism upon defendants, not to enable the government to convict whomever it sees fit. Further, absent some malfeasance such as bribery, jurists cannot be punished for delivering a verdict with which the government disagrees.

No jury should ever convict someone for simply possessing or carrying a weapon. No jury should ever convict someone for simply possessing an intoxicant. No jury should send a man to prison for stupid and vague regulations such as importing lobster in bags vs. boxes. Juries should nullify cases where adults choose to eat unhealthy foods like raw milk. Juries should nullify any federal law that exceeds the limits of the 10th Amendment.

Of course, prosecutors are not fond of independent thinkers who would decide for themselves whether a statute is constitutional and just. Indeed, they interview jury candidates to weed out such troublemakers. When the prosecutor asks a candidate whether he will obey the judge’s instructions, the candidate might say “yes, but I obviously will not abandon common sense.”

Likewise, defense counsel has a selfish interest in his client’s freedom. Lawyers may not flatly ask candidates if they intend to nullify. Defense counselors might instead ask this: “have you read the US Constitution?” The correlation between having read the Constitution and being interested in preserving liberty should be quite strong. Jury nullification is not about freeing criminals but about stopping the tens of thousands of unjust and unconstitutional laws.

Dear Reader: the next time you receive a jury summons, do not think of it as an intrusion into your free time; rather, think of jury duty as a chance to defend liberty. Before voting to convict the defendant, ask yourself if a law was actually violated. Did the government have the right to enact this law? Is the law consistent with natural rights? Where in the US Constitution or your state constitution is the power to enact this law? If the law is unjust by these measures, then the real crime is in enforcing it. Jurists have the right and responsibility to consider higher laws before turning an ordinary citizen into a criminal.

Shout Bits can be found on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ShoutBits

Bork’s Replacement

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Yesterday the Hon. Robert Bork passed away. Bork was targeted politically and his Supreme Court nomination crushed because he was a Constitutional originalist (i.e. The Constitution means what it says in plain English based on the common sense language of the day – radical). The list of GOP Senators who voted against him is a who’s-who of RINO traitors to liberty: John Chafee (RI, socialized medicine), Bob Packwood (OR, not so bad, but don’t hit on your assistants outside the Oval Office), Arlen Specter (PA, wrong on nearly every issue every time. The worst GOP Senator ever), Robert Stafford (VT, a Prescott Bush statist), John Warner (VA, leftist, endorser of Dem politicians, USSR ‘détente’ apologist) and Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. (CT, endorsed Howard Dean for Pres.). Whenever Dems blast ‘politicizing’ the judiciary, remember that to them, Borking is a one way street, a street they invented.

Less well remembered is the failed Court bid of Bork’s replacement, the Hon. Douglas Ginsburg. He was forced to withdraw his name from consideration because of some minor ethical conflicts, but mostly because he had smoked Marijuana. Nobody accused Ginsburg of being a burnt-out chronic, a wake-and-bake hippie, or a dealer. No, Ginsburg had smoked the MJ most recently ten years prior to his nomination, and reportedly only on occasion prior to that. Yet, his aspirations were ruined by the scandalous disclosure.

Think on Ginsburg’s story, freedom lovers. A man with good potential had probably his highest goal in life taken away because he did what the past three Presidents are known also to have done. Shout Bits is going out on a limb and risking a lawsuit, but Pres. Clinton did indeed inhale. Further, there is credible evidence that the past three Presidents also enjoyed cocaine. By Pres. Obama’s own account, he smoked a lot of the evil weed and snorted a lot of the jazz salt.

Ginsburg was forced to withdraw because of the obvious conflict in adjudicating the drug laws he once violated as a recreational user. Nobody likes a hypocrite, except the past three two-term Presidents, each of which escalated the war on the very drugs they once enjoyed. Apparently the electorate is OK with such blatant hypocrisy after all.

Ginsburg’s story, freedom lovers, is a milepost on the road to restoring personal responsibility and liberty in the category of libation. Today, nobody would demand court nominees to have never smoked MJ. Indeed, short of someone as sober as Gov. Romney, people are skeptical when anyone claims to have never tried it.

Looking back 25 years, MJ’s place in the culture has undergone a sea-change. As always, the Federal Government is the last to get the message. In large part driven by federal policy, arrests for simple MJ possession continue at a record pace. States like WA and CO do not need looking after by a Federal Government that cannot pass a budget. The People do not need to be dictated how to lead their lives by Mayor Soda Fountain, AG Gun Runner, or Pres. Choom Gang. As distant and irrational as Ginsburg’s story seems today, perhaps so too will be the story of these nanny-state hypocrites after another 25 years.

Selective Free Speech Rights

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With the Innocence of Muslims director under arrest for rather thin parole violation charges, many on the right have wondered where the Left has been on free speech. Should the ACLU, who regularly champion flag burners, step in to protest the backlash against clearly protected speech? Where are the Hollywood elites whose livelihoods depend on churning out offensive films? Nowhere, of course, and one cannot fully blame them; people who go against jihadists often find themselves with severed heads. There is another reason – to the Left, free speech has always been a canard to promote progressive change.

The ACLU was founded by Communists. Needless to say, communist regimes only promote free speech when it suits their purpose, so why has the ACLU often supported free speech? In order to advance change, leftists seek to break down traditional values, including commonly held decency standards. Radicals are not necessarily against traditionalism, they simply want to create new traditions and to do so they must destroy the old. As their name implies, traditions are hard to break down, so leftists have waged a decades long war on anything that smacks of American traditionalism. The ACLU may no longer be run by Communists, but their instinct to selectively fight free speech issues remains because it advances a left wing agenda.

The anti-anti-Muslim issue fits the Left’s anti-traditionalism strategy perfectly. Last month, NPR found the one person in America who thinks the First Amendment does not protect filmmakers from offending Muslims – Noah Feldman.

Noah Feldman’s arguments are outlandish: 1. The US standard of free speech is an anomaly compared to most nations. 2. The Middle East especially does not see speech rights the same way as do most Americans. 3. Best of all, the internet provides such immediacy and reach that speech is now so proximate and immediate that the old standard of incitement does not apply.

Well, Dr. Feldman: 1. The US free speech standard is the pinnacle of human rights, which is why it is anomalous. 2. The Middle East standard is akin to Stalin’s (free speech so long as it is approved), so the fact that it exists is no justification that it should. 3. The film NPR purports to be the cause of the riots and violence was three months old when the riots started. How is that proximate and immediate?

Here is what Dr. Feldman thinks of the First Amendment:

“When it was drafted, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution didn’t contemplate the radical freedom Americans now enjoy. Its language, drawn from English precedents, was aimed essentially at prohibiting what is called prior restraint . . . once you had spoken or written, you could still be punished for what you had freely said.”

The US Constitution is written in English, and the First Amendment’s meaning is unambiguous. Punishing speech either before or after is not a government’s power. Whether it has been misapplied before is irrelevant.

Currently, jihadists are a force against what the Left views as US imperialism. Despite their reign of terror, jihadists are generally given a pass with regard to their motives. The Obama Administration condemned a single movie maker at the same level as the millions of violent Islamic revolutionaries who bomb and behead completely innocent victims. Perhaps the Left will not criticize the religion of the jihadist because leftists and jihadists share a common enemy – traditional western values.

Through this prism, the Left’s selective support of free speech seems more logical. Atheists, but not Christians at school. Gay rights, but not chastity pledge rallies. Anti-Christian, but not anti-Muslim movies. These and other groups that think the Left looks out for their First Amendment rights should think again. Maybe the Left sees some of its constituents and their free speech rights as pawns in its bigger mission to expand government control. In the end, that mission ceases to protect free speech and extinguishes it.