These hopes have not exactly proven justified. This latest thing out of DC is just another example.
Pirro didn't walk back her statement that anyone bringing a gun into the District will go to jail, as well as her insistence that permit-holders from jurisdictions outside the District of Columbia would face charges for carrying in D.C., but she did try to clarify those remarks.
The 'clarification' amounts to explaining that what she said is just DC law, as indeed it is. But as Cam Edwards (a journalist with very solid pro-2A credentials over decades) goes on to point out, she's already established that she won't enforce DC law for DC residents; this is just one step beyond that.
Pirro has already declared that, in her view, D.C.'s ban on openly carried long guns and possession of "large capacity" magazines violates the Second Amendment and violations by lawful D.C. gun owners won't be prosecuted. If Pirro is willing to make a judgment call about the constitutionality of those statutes, then it stands to reason that she can do the same with D.C.'s lack of reciprocity... as well as its gun registration requirements.And if Pirro wants to charge someone with a valid Virginia or Maryland carry permit simply for carrying an "unregistered" gun and ammunition in D.C., that suggests that she finds those statutes 2A-compliant; a position that puts her at odds with the 2A community and even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who has suggested that a lack of reciprocity violates the Second Amendment.
Laws repugnant to the Constitution are null and void, someone once wrote. Prosecutorial discretion is a tool very widely abused, but a tool all the same. They don't want armed citizens near the seats of power, though, not Republican politicians and not Democratic ones.
6 comments:
Laws repugnant to the Constitution are null and void, someone once wrote.
Indeed so. The downside, though, is that laws are not repugnant to the Constitution until they're ruled so in court, with the ruling surviving all appeals.
Cases must be brought and won, first.
Eric Hines
The courts aren't special; the if enough of the people say it's repugnant, and the Supreme Court says otherwise, too bad for the Supreme Court. Their authority to make such a claim is itself extra-constitutional (though not un-constitutional); it lasts as long as we continue to accept it. A fact they would do well to keep in mind, I think.
And that's what would make us a nation of men and not a nation of laws, two mutually exclusive states. And that would quickly devolve into the chaos of might making right.
Eric Hines
It only holds in cases where a sufficiently large number reject the views of the very tiny minority of jurists on a court. They were never licensed to rule us. As the Declaration of Arbroath explains, right after accepting Robert the Bruce as their lawful king — who might indeed be expected to rule them! — ‘But if he yields in any way to English domination, we shall throw him out and choose another.’
The compromise position is that the states can, by a 2/3rds majority vote, call a constitutional convention and, by a 3/4 majority vote, ratify any amendments that they choose. A sufficient majority in that case could abolish the Supreme Court, or all Federal Courts. It could relocate the power to interpret the Constitution. It could do whatever it wants with the law, including the basic law.
If you are right about your first principles from the last post, the law is then no guarantee of anything. It is as Socrates held: that though the law can be made to say anything, only the divine can define justice. Laws out of order with such justice are then invalid, even more than laws repugnant to the Constitution.
If you are right about your first principles from the last post, the law is then no guarantee of anything.
And, indeed, it is not. But the written law, like our written Constitution, gives us a known, understandable starting point and a means of slowing the drift. At bottom, though, it is as Franklin said, and what Madison said at the Virginia ratifying convention:
If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
It takes a virtuous people to hold to the law, and if the law or any particular statute is bad, to change the law or statute, in order to maintain the touchstone, rather than merely ignoring the allegedly bad law, which leads directly and shortly to lawlessness.
Eric Hines
Yeah, let’s talk more about this. I don’t have time to write it up tonight, but just as there is an important distinction between philosophical and the subsets of philosophy, there’s an important distinction between philosophy and religion. But there’s also a good set of empirical reasons to doubt that any of those actually account for the rights we enjoy. I’ll try to find time for that tomorrow.
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