Thursday, September 05, 2019

"We can no longer have any expectation of good faith, sound process or common sense. In this environment, it’s preposterous to believe that we can start putting asterisks on the Second Amendment and hope that it will survive."

Ann Coulter writes on her website,
Americans used to be able to rely on two bulwarks to protect us from stupidity:

1) Legal process -- The genius of our founders was to strictly limit the power of capricious, and often armed, government officials and to create a government of laws that made major changes difficult, but not impossible.

You want a new amendment to the Constitution? Get 38 states to ratify it, two-thirds of the Senate to vote for it, the president to sign it. There -- you’ve changed the constitution. You oppose a law? Run for office, put a proposition on the ballot, donate to a campaign, persuade your fellow citizens -- or move to a different state.

2) Common sense -- We also used to be able to assume that a basic reasonableness undergirded our society, flowing across generational lines, political divides, racial differences and policy disputes. Until the 1970s, for example, federal courts mostly enforced actual legal and constitutional rights on the books. The other branches of government tended to perform their roles in good faith -- or at least not in obvious bad faith.

Whether you were a Taft Republican or a JFK Democrat, you believed that we had a border, that people here illegally would be processed according to law, that there were two sexes, that free speech was a hallmark of our nation, and that a kid could dress up as a cowboy or Indian for Halloween without being branded a “racist.”

Naturally, therefore, my first instinct was to assume that our shared respect for process and decency remained. But I now realize that’s wrong.

...We’re dealing with people who are not honest brokers. We can no longer have any expectation of good faith, sound process or common sense.

In this environment, it’s preposterous to believe that we can start putting asterisks on the Second Amendment and hope that it will survive.

We can’t entrust our liberties to your dirty hands.
Read more here.

No comments: