I’ve just been reading a piece on Daily Kos that inspired me with the brilliance it describes, and the brilliant job it does of painting the landscape on an important topic: i.e. how America deals with guns, which is presently quite crazy, and the fact that the Supreme Court has made itself part of the craziness.
It’s “Judge Carlton Reeves challenges Clarence Thomas on guns,” written by Bassweasel.
A Judge Carlton Reeves in Mississippi has made a move that, I understand it, impressively makes the most of his opportunities to strike a blow for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. (All of which are now under extraordinary threat.)
From reading that piece, which I highly recommend, here is what I gather, and here are the thoughts that come to me:
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Judge Reeves has been presented with a case in which he has to judge the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that would keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons. If I understand, the Supreme Court’s most recent decision about guns would seem to require this Mississippi judge to strike down the law, though it seems more than likely that this law is fine with the Constitution properly understood.
From the move he’s making, I imagine this judge to have some integrity, and therefore it galls him to think of just ratifying what this Supreme Court has said in the fundamentally corrupt – and poorly argued – decisions the Supreme Court has made about gun rights in recent years. And that Court has based those decisions on a false picture they’ve concocted of what history says the framers of the Second Amendment had in mind.
The real problem with the Court’s decision, I would bet, is less that they couldn’t come to better historical judgment. Their real reasons were more corrupt, stemming from the disturbing reality that the majority has made the Court just an extension of the Republican Party.
Nonetheless, that majority pretended that it was real constitutional history that governed their judgment. And that pretense has opened up an opportunity for a judge like Carlton Reeve who, as I imagine him, has too much integrity to just keep his head down and defer to a Court that lacks integrity.
So Judge Reeves, as reported by Bassweasel’s article, is taking the move — irreproachable for a judge to take -- of saying, in effect, “In order to decide the case before me, I want as good an understanding as I can get of what the history says about how the Second Amendment should be understood and how our founders would have thought it should be applied in the America of this time.”
And so Judge Reeves declares that we judges should call upon the people who are better than we judges are at interpreting the evidence of history. And he decides that he will get the best available answer to such historical questions. I imagine he is confident that a valid historical analysis will almost surely expose what bullshit the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have been putting out, to paper over their (most likely) deliberate attempt to give the nation bad law on the gun issue.
I imagine Reeves has every expectation that those historians will give him the raw material from which he can fashion a decision on the Mississippi case. In that decision, as I foresee how this will play out, Reeves will uphold a sane law, because — as the historians have found -- the people who wrote the Second Amendment wouldn’t have had any problem with it.
And from that raw material, I am imagining, Judge Reeve will write out a decision which makes an absolutely compelling case that the Supreme Court’s decisions should not stand.
Assuming he composes his decision well, Judge Reeves might strike a real blow for greater gun sanity – and against the corrupt Court whose arguments are often (and not just on guns) just ways of papering over arriving at the results that the Republican Power wants.
Ideally, Judge Reeve’s presumably compelling argument would move the Court. But that depends on these Justices having the integrity to bow to an irresistible argument. A doubtful assumption:
- They didn’t have integrity when the Republican-appointed Justices opened the floodgates to money in our politics with Citizens United, saying absurdly that this would not have a corrupting effect on our political process.
- They didn’t have integrity when they gutted the Voting Rights Act while pretending they didn’t know full well that the states of the former Confederacy were primed, if given the chance, to resume their old pattern of disenfranchising African-Americans.
They’re not stupid enough to believe what they said on those things, and I doubt they’re stupid enough to believe their arguments in Heller and in Bruen. So one must suspect that, if their arguments didn’t get them to their conclusions, Judge Reeve’s exposing the absurdity of those arguments likely won’t move them. Unless, perhaps, there’s a limit to their shamelessness.
But even if they were to reverse Reeves’ decision in Mississippi, his document – if it’s good enough -- will live on, shining a continuing spotlight on the gun craziness and corruption of the Republican majority on the Court and the Republican Party more generally.
I deeply admire the creativity of this Judge in seeing the opportunity he’d been dealt, and seizing that opportunity in a way that maximizes his impact from the less-than-salient bench on which he sits.
I see Judge Reeves, in this situation, as something of a “war hero,” fighting as part of a larger Force that needs all the help it can get these days: the Force of Democracy and the Force of Constructiveness, which are being challenged right now in America by the destructive Force of Fascism.
This Court has crossed over a line. The same Force that’s been transforming the Republican Party into the Trump Party, has changed a Supreme Court from a place where reasonably honest interpretation of the Constitution played an important role in their decisions, to one where the majority seems quite indifferent to such quaint notions as that this is “a nation of laws, and not men.”
But this Court increasingly looks not like a place where the law will be properly applied so much as a place where the law has been turned into a weapon of a political Force. And that is one of the hallmarks of the Fascism that this Republican Party now pretty openly represents in a whole variety of ways.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” Lincoln said. And indeed, so we are today. That war is being fought on multiple battlefronts. And Judge Reeves is one of the soldiers in the fight against Fascism. I applaud how he’s found a way to have a potential impact out of scale with the forces at his command.
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Postscript: Why Do the Republicans Want Such Bad Decisions on Guns?
It seems clear that the Republican world doesn’t want for this nation to have reasonable gun laws, that it wants the nation to have laws that condemn our society to suffer massacres and murders at rates far beyond those of other free societies like ourselves.
But why? Why would the Republicans — like those partisans on the Court -- bother to decide in this corrupt way on the gun issue. What interest of theirs does it serve to have America so unable to protect the public safety in the reasonable ways that our peers have come up with?
The answer, I believe, is that the gun issue has proved to be a means to develop a large cadre of one-issue voters. Gun rights and abortion have been the two big issues that serve the Republicans that way, i.e. people can be persuaded that this issue is so important that it’s all that matters for deciding what candidate and party to support. (When I ran for Congress, I did have people come up to me and say, “Where do you stand on guns? That’s all I need to know about you.”)
If the United States were to come to some reasonable settlement regarding how to balance gun and public safety, as the other decent democracies seem to have done, then — with that issue settled — those one-issue voters would start voting on other issues, like all the ways the Republicans are screwing them.
It therefore strengthens the Republican Party to have the gun issue unresolvable.
They teach their voters that any regulation is just a step toward their guns being taken away (their being “unmanned”) leaving them vulnerable to the tyranny that would supposedly arise if the people weren’t armed to the teeth. (An idea that’s believed, despite the obvious evidence that other free nations can pass laws that lead to one-tenth of our rate of gun deaths without any evidence that their democratic freedoms have been jeopardized.)
In my part of America, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the gun issue is central for many -- perhaps most -- of the men of the region. If the gun issue could come to some reasonable balance, that would weaken the power of the Fascist Party that’s now controlling the Supreme Court.