MAGA has put us in a post-rule of law world, we need to protect ourselves
Beware of the religious zealots and bigots whose contempt for the rule of law is only matched by the love of power.
When it comes to living together in a nation of laws, well MAGA isn’t interested. Even though they have captured the Supreme Court, they are unable to curb their impatient will to power. This week Louisiana enacted a law requiring classrooms to display the 10 commandments. Never mind that the Supreme Court has already ruled on this. They struck down a similar law from Kentucky in 1980. This MAGA legislature is saying in effect, that they do not care what the law is, they will impose their own agenda.
Louisiana’s move follows Texas’ illegal move to assume border control from the federal government. It follows the lionization of Joe Arpaio, you remember him. He was the Arizona Sheriff who refused to follow the nation’s immigration laws and just rounded up folks he thought looked Mexican. His crimes earned him a pardon from Donald Trump. Why bother with the law when you have a get out of jail free card. Arpaio wasn’t alone. Mr. Trump’s list of pardons lays bare his contempt for the law.
As bad as that is, we can live with some abuse of the pardon power. What we cannot live with are a Supreme Court and Republican controlled states that are equally casual about the law.
About his ten commandments mandate, Governor Landry said, “I can’t wait to be sued.” He is, of course, confident that this corrupt and captured court will overturn their previous decision. And knowing them, they might. But today, the law is clear and the religious zealots that give MAGA so much of its energy simply do not care.
I warned you we might soon come to this moment. This is when, for various reasons and across the country, governments simply ignore the Supreme Court. After all, it has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the public, now polling as less popular than that historically corrupt body, the Chicago Council. Its tortured opinions are meant to put fig leaves on decisions that have real no purchase in law or in society as it is today.
Consider these cases: Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and now Bruen. These are all gun cases, and across the country, cities like mine complied by getting rid of sensible firearms laws.
Taken together you can see the way this court acts over time. Heller was in 2008. It said the Second Amendment protects the right to possess firearms without connection to a militia, and that firearms can be used for self defense in homes. That was the case where those originalists simply threw out the first part of the second amendment, the part that reads “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free state.”
Two years later, in McDonald, the court tossed Chicago’s gun laws, saying the 14th Amendment incorporates the second amendment. That means states and cities must afford people the same second amendment rights as the federal government. This is a view of the 14th Amendment they found untenable this year when it came to Colorado’s right to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot based on his participation in an insurrection.
In the 2016 Caetano case, the Court said the second amendment extends to all sorts of bearable arms, even ones not in existence during the writing and ratifying of the second amendment. Um… in Dobbs Justice Alito focused on what the founders thought in their day, and even relied on some medieval jurisprudence to show what those early legislators might have been thinking. But, hey, when it comes to an assault weapon, who cares what they had in mind?
And now we have Bruen, which says anyone can turn a handgun into an assault weapon because somehow that is consistent with our historical tradition of firearms regulation.
I am taking you through these cases because I think it is time that states like mine follow the lead of Texas and Louisiana and simply defy the Court. Let’s restore the common-sense gun laws we had in the 1990s. Let’s make our streets and our people and even our police safer.
To be sure, I think we would be better off as a nation if the rule of law held across all fifty states. But we do not live in that time anymore. We live in the era of a partisan court. We live in a time of religious zealots and bigots whose contempt for the rule of law is only matched by the love of power. We must not submit.