Saturday, June 22, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.
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Virtual Briefing at the White House on the 2nd Anniversary of the Overturning of Roe v. Wade.
When: Monday, June 24th Time: 4:30-5:00pm EST RSVP: https://pitc.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_Y2Q3CY3vSVidZ1HPilGNnw
We've been writing postcards with the Blue Wave Postcard Movement with some of our Sonoma friends.
It's an easy way to engage voters, register them, and turn them out to vote. Blue Wave is a non-profit organization that runs strategic and effective campaigns in battleground states. They have been doing that since 2020 and plan to reach out to 5 million voters this year!
Wisconsin is a crucial state. That's the state they are targeting now. Here's how to order postcard kits: http://bluewavepostcards.org. And spread the word to other friends, too. Thanks! Carolyn (Lynn) Anderson and Sandra (Sandy) Thompson.”
One more thing. Needless to say, you don’t have to be from Sonoma to write postcards to get out voters in swing states.
Kamala is always busy.
Touch and Watch to see each of the 6 graduating Sandy Hook survivors.👇
Nearly 12 years after surviving the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Emma, Grace, Matt, Ella, Henry, and Lilly graduated from high school last week.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 20, 2024
They represent the millions of children across our nation who have been impacted by gun violence. I am grateful for their… pic.twitter.com/5WkmSa5kXt
An Analysis of Friday’s Supreme Court Ruling.
“People under domestic violence restraining orders can be prosecuted if they possess a firearm.”
Who Can Have A Gun?
Today,[Friday] SCOTUS ruled that people under domestic violence restraining orders can be prosecuted if they possess a firearm. The Chief Justice called it a “commonsense” decision. Chief Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But that has been what the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence amounted to before today, up to and including last week’s decision in the bump stock case, which essentially says that anyone who wants to have a machine gun can have one. Rather than taking time to reflect, I decided to share my hot takes on Rahimi with you in real-time.
U.S. v. Rahimi was decided 8-1. The court ruled that when an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the safety of another person, the first person’s right to possess firearms can be taken away, at least temporarily. The majority opinion is authored by Chief Justice Roberts. Only Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent. And there was a free-for-all when it came to concurrences—multiple Justices wanted to make their views known, most notably Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who took Justice Thomas’s dissent head on. Justice Thomas is an absolutist when it comes to the Second Amendment, he’s the Oprah of firearms. Everyone gets a gun. Thomas believes limits are only acceptable if they were in place at the founding of the country and are rooted in our history and tradition. That’s the standard he got the Court to rally around when it decided Bruen.
In her concurring opinion, Justice Jackson says, “enough!” Women had few if any protections from domestic violence at the founding. Men could not, in the eyes of the law, rape their wives. There was no protection from physical assault by a husband, perpetrated by musket or otherwise. Justice Jackson writes that we are not locked into what the founders did. Justice Thomas’ weak rejoinder was, “not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.” We are likely to see more of this debate about precisely what it means to be an originalist next term.
The new standard that emerged today is that it’s acceptable for Congress to put limits on firearm possession if the person being restrained is a danger to others. That’s a wobbly standard. Does it apply to all people with prior felony convictions? Or does it apply only to violent offenders, but not to bank tellers convicted of larceny? What about other categories of people prohibited from owning a firearm under the statute Mr. Rahimi was prosecuted under? That includes fugitives, addicts, “mental defectives” (the language in the statute, not mine), aliens without legal immigration status, people with dishonorable discharge from the military, and people who have renounced their American citizenship, along with people who have been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence offenses and people under domestic violence restraining orders.
Our criminal laws are supposed to be definite and provide certainty so people can ascertain what conduct is criminal and what conduct they can lawfully engage in. The Supreme Court has created a hash in this area. The problems stem from a series of bad decisions, starting with Heller. That case extended the Second Amendment protection for well-armed militias to permit individual Americans to possess virtually any kind of firearm that wasn’t fully automatic or short-barreled in their home, under a self-defense rationale. Then came Bruen, the New York case, where the Court struck down what it termed unreasonable limitations by the state on public possession of firearms. The net result of those two cases was to broadly sanction both private and public possession of firearms. The criminal statute at issue here was one of the last firewalls still in place.
After today’s decision, we know it can be used for people under domestic violence restraining orders, but we don’t know more than that. In that sense, this is a lackluster decision. That’s more a complaint about the way the Court has permitted the law to unfold across a series of Second Amendment cases than it is about this one. As Justice Gorsuch correctly notes in his concurrence, “Article III of the Constitution vests in this Court the power to decide only the ‘actual cas[e]’ before us, ‘not abstractions.’” Let’s hope he feels the same way in the presidential immunity case.
My dear colleague, Professor Paul Butler, at Georgetown’s Law Center, pointed out to me that there is tension between criticizing the decision—calling it lackluster—but at the same time praising the Court for using restraint and not exceeding the bounds of the fact situation presented here. He’s absolutely correct. His thought was that while the Court is not going to reverse Heller, this opinion does make us less dangerous and vulnerable. He pointed out that Rahimi frees the courts from Bruen's originalist hell, where we could never have more rights than those that existed at the founding. The Court could have described the statute Mr. Rahimi was charged under as consistent with gun history and tradition. Instead, they seem to have created a new exception to the Bruen standard that, on a first read (the case is over 100 pages), authorizes Congress to keep guns away from "dangerous people" (whatever that means) or people who might cause physical harm. Rahimi could signal that the Court will gently back away from the precipice created by Heller and Bruen. We will not know for certain until the Court decides the next round of decisions in this area, but I take at least a little heart from Paul’s point.
Remember July 4, 2022, when the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Illinois said it was time to move on just two hours after the shooting in Highland Park that left six people dead and 24 seriously injured. (He later said that wasn’t what he meant).
That’s where absolutist Second Amendment jurisprudence leaves us, so it’s a positive to see the Court stem the tide, even just a little bit, today. But this decision wasn’t a radical move to protect Americans, it simply permits the status quo to remain in place. Federal prosecutors are free to continue to prosecute at least some people under a statute that has traditionally been used widely to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
At the time of that Illinois shooting, I wrote in the newsletter, “The truth is this: the Founding Fathers would not have wanted the country to live like this. Their muskets weren’t so sacred to them that they would have sacrificed our children to them. They didn’t pass the Second Amendment so parents could get shot in our streets on the 4th of July. The Second Amendment’s well-regulated militia wasn’t supposed to be shooting at us!” I still believe that’s true. Justice Jackson gets it right here.
As the Fifth Circuit noted at the start of its decision in Rahimi, “The question presented…is not whether prohibiting the possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order is a laudable policy goal. The question is whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), a specific statute that does so, is constitutional under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.” They went on to reach a conclusion that the Supreme Court reversed today, “In the light of N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen…it is not.” Despite the small firewall today’s Supreme Court decision leaves in place, the state of the Second Amendment in this country still leaves Americans in a dangerous, vulnerable place.
You’ll find the decision here. (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-915_8o6b.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)
We’re in this together. (Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse).
GOP Convention security will allow guns within outer perimeter, sets parade route for demonstrators https://t.co/cgq5eqwBZx
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 21, 2024
Your Daily Reminder.
Trump is a convicted felon.
On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.
He will be sentenced on July 11th.
Trump continues to be politically viable only because of Republican enablers.
This is a national disgrace. Share it.
On the House Floor, Republicans Gag Mentions of Trump’s Conviction [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/us/politics/house-republicans-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb]
During official proceedings of the G.O.P.-controlled chamber, speaking about former President Donald J. Trump’s felony conviction has been forbidden, while disparaging President Biden and Democrats is routine.
The floor of the United States House of Representatives is supposed to be a dignified place, where lawmakers refer to each other as “gentleman” or “gentle lady,” speak only to the presiding officer, and never engage in personally disparaging remarks against rivals, an offense known as “engaging in personalities.”
But what happens when the leader of one party is a convicted criminal whom a jury has found guilty of things that would normally be considered unmentionable on the House floor?
The history-making felony conviction of former President Donald J. Trump has raised some historic questions for the House’s rules of decorum, which have existed for centuries but can be bent to the will of whichever party controls the majority-driven chamber.
The Republicans who now hold the majority have used those rules to impose what is essentially a gag order against talking about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments to a porn actress or about the fact that he is a felon at all, notwithstanding that those assertions are no longer merely allegations but the basis of a jury’s guilty verdict. Doing so, they have declared, is a violation of House rules.
In short, perhaps the only place in the United States where people are barred from talking freely about Mr. Trump’s crimes is the floor of what is often referred to as “the people’s House,” where Republicans have gone so far as to erase one such mention from the official record.
“The chair would remind members to refrain from engaging in personalities toward presumptive nominees for the office of the president,” is now a common phrase heard in the chamber after the mention of the words “Trump” and “felon.”
“When they censor any mention of Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, they are essentially trying to ban a fact,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “I am not aware of any precedent where factual statements have been banned in our lifetime.”
Mr. Raskin said the silencing of Mr. Trump’s critics on the House floor had a historical analog: the House’s pre-Civil War ban on legislation relating to the abolition of slavery. In 1836, the House passed a so-called gag rule that automatically postponed action on all petitions related to slavery without hearing them.
“In a legislative sense, this was of course far more important than the new rule against mentioning Trump’s criminal record,” Mr. Raskin said.
Still, he said, he considers the prohibition against criticizing Mr. Trump’s felon status “Orwellian.”
On one occasion, Republicans barred Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, from speaking for the rest of the day and deleted his comments from the Congressional Record after he railed against Mr. Trump and his court cases.
For his part, Mr. Raskin has tried to come up with creative ways to invoke Mr. Trump’s criminal cases without running afoul of the ruling.
During a recent floor speech, he made reference to an “unmentionable American felon, one of 19 million in the country” and an “unrepentant and anonymous convicted felon from New York” without mentioning the former president by name. He referred to Mr. Trump’s hush-money case as “the trial whose very existence must be sent down the Orwellian memory hole to save someone’s hurt feelings.”
In the interview, he noted that no rule could erase the facts of Mr. Trump’s status as a felon.
“I’m afraid the Republicans have now invited a contest for how creative we can be in talking about Donald Trump’s criminal convictions without explicitly stating those words,” Mr. Raskin said.(New York Times)
Joe will be at Camp David tomorrow preparing for the debate. Somewhere in this great country, the former guy will be spreading venom and saying clap trap like this. 👇
And I - I will be getting ready to move to Montauk by the sea for the summer. Lucky me.
I hope your days this weekend will be at least as satisfying.
See you with more updates on Tuesday.