The Patriot Sheepdog

State legislatures must convene to control governors’ growing tyranny

2020-03-27T10:23:00.003-05:00

Daniel Horowitz · March 26, 2020

It’s become a game. Every day at a specific time, each governor, and now even county executive, announces a press conference where, with the flick of the pen, they issue edicts that violate more inalienable natural rights than at any time in this nation’s history. What started out as a prudent move has now devolved into a free-for-all of tyranny against peaceful citizens, as authorities release criminals from prison. It’s time to demand that state legislatures reconvene and start setting parameters and guidelines. It’s time to return to self-governance.

We all went along with the severe social distancing and the termination of all public gatherings to help safety during this epidemic. Even this is no picnic, because it includes the cancellation of all religious services as well as school. We must recognize the danger of unilateral executive actions halting the most sacred constitutional rights. Nonetheless, it was clear that these first actions were called for and passed the rational basis test of using the policies least restrictive of liberty to achieve a vital state interest.

Now, however, that states are moving to indefinite lockdowns without presenting any evidence that this is needed, over and above the severe distancing, it’s past time for us to ask questions. Placing Americans indefinitely under house arrest without any due process, transparency, time limit, guidelines, or checks and balances on a single executive is something that should shake us to our core.

That is true even if we were dealing with Ebola and a 60 percent death rate. It would certainly be necessary in that case, but still we should be jarred by the short-term and long-term implications of one county or state official wielding such power and the economic, logistical, mental health, and physical health problems it’s creating. Mark my words: This genie will not be put back in the bottle.

Here is the state of play at this moment. President Trump clearly understands the need for a proper balance and to more effectively target the quarantine while putting as many people back to work as possible. However, the governors have made it clear that they have an agenda to keep wielding this power indefinitely and won’t even join the president in at least striving for a return to work – not even to normal life but just to the first level of social distancing – by mid-April. There is something very disquieting about what is motivating these governors to act so callously against liberty and not even treat this as an evil at all, even a necessary one.

Also, numerous blue city and county executives are ordering house arrest policies. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is threatening to cut off power and water to businesses. If these are the drastic measures they’re taking less than two weeks into this, one can only imagine where they are headed unless we check their behavior.

Patriots need to prepare for this showdown if and when the federal government offers guidance to achieve proper balance and states still reject it for political reasons. Are we really OK with giving governors and county/city executives this much power indefinitely?

We want strong leadership during a time of crisis, and you can’t have legislatures making every last decision. But there must be some checks and balances or at least transparency measures checking these emergency powers that violate the essence of the Declaration of Independence, especially when much of the science driving the underlying push for lockdown appears to be driven by the same politicized academia as global warming.

Moreover, there already are numerous cooks in the kitchen, with each governor and county leader drawing up his or her own royal edicts. So why not at least bring a few hundred legislators into the process?

It’s time for patriots to flood their state legislators with calls and demand that they reconvene and deal with some of the liberty issues, crime, and logistical and fiscal issues inherent in this crisis. It’s time to return to self-government. They must push legislation along the following lines:

Require that any violation of the Constitution under the guise of stemming an epidemic expire after seven days. In order to renew it, the governor would need to submit clear findings to the legislature and publicize them online articulating why this is the least restrictive means necessary to achieve the goal.
Address the parameters of why some functions are deemed essential and weigh them against the public safety concerns.
No top-level state official may get paid until the severe lockdown orders are rescinded.
Stop the unaccountable release of criminals.
Within the home rule parameters of state laws, rein in the edicts of some cities that are taking these measures too far.
There must be a rigorous debate about the underlying data driving specific strategies and whether they are really prudent.

These are very reasonable and simple ideas that still leave the governors with tremendous latitude.

Finally, President Trump must tell these local officials that if they continue to destroy the economy after these measures are no longer necessary, they own the mess. Right now, they are counting on getting bailed out from the economic mess and don’t see any downside to their tyrannical virtue-signaling. The bill headed for Trump’s desk now sends $150 billion to the states. That must change. They can’t play up state powers in both directions – become dictators but then count on a federal bailout.

Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We need not choose between liberty and death here, but if our Founders valued liberty to that extent, does it not behoove us to at least get on the playing field and call some red flags? As John Adams wrote in 1765, “Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

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California Ushers in 2018 with Ammunition Control

2018-01-02T05:18:00.001-06:00

It is January 1, 2018, which means law-abiding Californians can no longer buy ammunition out-of-state or possess an unregistered AR-15 with a bullet button accessory.

On December 13, 2017, Breitbart News reported that California’s war on guns was about to expand to a war on ammunition, and January 1 marks the day that the war on ammunition begins.

Currently, law-abiding Californians must buy their ammunition from a licensed in-state ammunition dealer. This means that Californians who buy ammunition online must have that ammo shipped to a licensed in-state dealer and pay that dealer a fee when picking up the ammo.

These controls immediately lessen the supply of ammunition, thereby driving up the price for those who demand it. Also, these controls set the stage for phase two of ammunition control, which will consist of requiring a point-of-sale background check for ammunition purchases starting January 1, 2019. The point-of-sale background check will also carry a processing fee, which will drive the price of ammunition even higher.

These controls are in addition to the requirement that law-abiding Californians obtain a firearm safety certificate from the state before buying a firearm, endure a ten-day waiting period for gun purchases, pass a universal background check, register all firearms with the state, and live under the shadow of gun confiscation laws. There is an “assault weapons” ban, a ban on campus carry, and a new law against K-12 teachers being armed to shoot back if under attack at school.

California also has a “good cause” requirement for concealed carry, which allows bureaucrats within the issuing system to strictly control the number of permits given to law-abiding citizens. This single gun control has resulted in limiting the number of permits issued in Los Angeles County to 197; Los Angles County has a population of 10.2 million, yet only 197 concealed carry permits have been issued to the law-abiding citizens residing there.

The “good cause” requirement affords onlookers a great opportunity to see how gun control empowers criminals by keeping law-abiding citizens disarmed.

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A Coming Era of Civil Disobedience?

2015-07-13T16:34:00.003-05:00

Americans are no strangers to lawbreaking. After all, what else was our revolution, but a rebellion to overthrow the centuries-old rule of the king and parliament?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol.

Calling the Commandments “religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths,” the court said the monument must go.

Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation to let voters cut out of their constitution the specific article the justices invoked. Some legislators want the justices impeached.

Fallin’s action seems a harbinger of what is to come in America — an era of civil disobedience like the 1960s, where court orders are defied and laws ignored in the name of conscience and a higher law.

Only this time, the rebellion is likely to arise from the right.

Certainly, Americans are no strangers to lawbreaking. What else was our revolution but a rebellion to overthrow the centuries-old rule and law of king and Parliament, and establish our own?

U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been defied, and those who defied them lionized by modernity. Thomas Jefferson freed all imprisoned under the sedition act, including those convicted in court trials presided over by Supreme Court justices. Jefferson then declared the law dead.

Some Americans want to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, who, defying the Dred Scott decision and fugitive slave acts, led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln’s Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III’s England.

Millions of Americans, with untroubled consciences, defied the Volstead Act, imbibed alcohol and brought an end to Prohibition.

In the civil rights era, defying laws mandating segregation and ignoring court orders banning demonstrations became badges of honor.

Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the “back of the bus.”

In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine — “an unjust law is no law at all” — and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

Said King, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

But who decides what is an “unjust law”?

If, for example, one believes that abortion is the killing of an unborn child and same-sex marriage is an abomination that violates “eternal law and natural law,” do those who believe this not have a moral right if not a “moral responsibility to disobey such laws”?

Rosa Parks is celebrated.

But the pizza lady who said her Christian beliefs would not permit her to cater a same-sex wedding was declared a bigot. And the LGBT crowd, crowing over its Supreme Court triumph, is writing legislation to make it a violation of federal civil rights law for that lady to refuse to cater that wedding.

But are people who celebrate the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village as the Mount Sinai moment of their movement really standing on solid ground to demand that we all respect the Obergefell decision as holy writ?

And if cities, states or Congress enact laws that make it a crime not to rent to homosexuals, or to refuse services at celebrations of their unions, would not dissenting Christians stand on the same moral ground as Dr. King if they disobeyed those laws?

Already, some businesses have refused to comply with the Obamacare mandate to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees. Priests and pastors are going to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. Churches and chapels will refuse to host them. Christian colleges and universities will deny married-couple facilities to homosexuals.

Laws will be passed to outlaw such practices as discrimination, and those laws, which the Christians believe violate eternal law and natural law, will, as Dr. King instructed, be disobeyed.

And the removal of tax exemptions will then be on the table.

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

Something like that is happening in the country.

A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural, and political views and values, is taking place.

America is disuniting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 25 years ago.

And for those who, when young, rejected the views, values and laws of Eisenhower’s America, what makes them think that dissenting Americans in this post-Christian and anti-Christian era will accept their laws, beliefs, values?

Why should they?

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