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A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss
It's The Amendments, Stupid
March 16, 2000
As we slog through the absurdities of the modern political campaign, choking on town hall meetings, Carvillism, network polls, and the limitless erudition of Mr. Jonathan Alter, we'd do well to remember that there are ten simple reasons why all this foofaraw still matters.
They begin with the singularly lovely words, "Congress shall make no law," and they add up to the fragile but durable document known as the Bill of Rights -- the first ten amendments to the Constitution, devised by Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison in the course of a fierce four-year battle to protect the rights of ordinary citizens against the inevitable inclinations of a powerful central government.
The winner of this year's presidential wrestling match will name, at a minimum, three Supreme Court justices. They will largely determine how -- and whether -- the Bill of Rights survives into the 21st century.
This is no small matter: not when you contemplate the Democratic Party's increasingly audacious assault on the First and Second Amendments.
The First Amendment protects -- among other gorgeous intangibles -- our right to be loons, dissenters, conservatives, liberals, curmudgeons, or couch potatoes, as we please.
With it, we are free men and women: without it, we aren't much of anything at all, until we're told otherwise.
The attack on the First Amendment currently centers on the issue of campaign finance reform, which (however it's tarted up with high-falutin' oratory) remains a scarily transparent effort to nationalize the marketplace of ideas.
But campaign finance reform is a fringe issue, with little popular support. As such, it's only one front in a broad-based Democratic assault on First Amendment rights.
The free exercise of religion is also very much at stake.
For years, liberals have invoked grotesque misreadings of the establishment clause to assail everything from school vouchers to Christmas pageants.
Now, the Gore campaign has added a new twist, a 'Bob Jones' strategy that plays on the media caricature of the religious right as a mob of racist, theocratic clinic-bombers.
It's nothing less than a tactical war on the fundamental right of religious conservatives to participate in the civic life of the nation, not only as activists, but as voters.
This is left-McCarthyism at its nastiest, as venomous and intolerant as anything we've seen. Still, it plays well with certain core Democratic constituencies -- notably elite journalists, who tend to perceive religion through a veil of unapologetic bigotry. (They make an exception, naturally, for such men of faith as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.)
On another front, Democrats have spiced the campaign with zealous calls for 'hate crimes' legislation, which would empower the state to criminalize words and even thoughts. This eerie assault on the freedom of speech should alarm all civil libertarians.
So much for the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, thanks to National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, the left's passionate crusade against the Second Amendment took on new life this week.
Last Sunday on ABC, Mr. LaPierre spoke a little too bluntly about President Clinton's peculiar talent for making political hay of grief and violence.
The press responded with swift and predictable outrage: indeed, no Republican can now appear before a camera without immediately being instructed to denounce Mr. LaPierre and the NRA . This gives those nightly newscasts a creepy ambience, kind of like the Moscow Show Trials with beer commercials.
There's no small hypocrisy in this. For years, Beltway reporters have watched (aiding and abetting now and again) as Mr. Clinton deftly exploited such tragedies as the Oklahoma City bombing to score points against his political adversaries. They've chuckled about it amongst themselves -- they've even allowed whispers of it to slip into their reporting. If ever there was 'old news,' this is it.
But -- to the delight of Democratic strategists -- most establishment journalists don't like guns, and they don't like gun-owners. What's more, they think it's simply appalling that a bourgeois, 18th century document devised by a pack of politically-incorrect dead white guys should be allowed to stand in the way of the gun-control legislation they so passionately endorse.
All this has served, amazingly, to make a principled defense of the Second Amendment a political liability for Republicans.
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "[a] bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse."
Evidently, Mr. Gore doesn't agree. Should he win in November, it's a fair bet that his Supreme Court nominees won't agree, either.
Which brings us full circle. Despite the frenzy of hype and bile we'll have to endure in coming months, there are still ten simple reasons why we should care about this presidential contest.
Think of it this way. If they succeed in mowing down the first two, there are just eight more to go.
------------------
Slowpoke Rodrigo...he pack a gon...
Vote for the Neal Knox 13
A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss
It's The Amendments, Stupid
March 16, 2000
As we slog through the absurdities of the modern political campaign, choking on town hall meetings, Carvillism, network polls, and the limitless erudition of Mr. Jonathan Alter, we'd do well to remember that there are ten simple reasons why all this foofaraw still matters.
They begin with the singularly lovely words, "Congress shall make no law," and they add up to the fragile but durable document known as the Bill of Rights -- the first ten amendments to the Constitution, devised by Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison in the course of a fierce four-year battle to protect the rights of ordinary citizens against the inevitable inclinations of a powerful central government.
The winner of this year's presidential wrestling match will name, at a minimum, three Supreme Court justices. They will largely determine how -- and whether -- the Bill of Rights survives into the 21st century.
This is no small matter: not when you contemplate the Democratic Party's increasingly audacious assault on the First and Second Amendments.
The First Amendment protects -- among other gorgeous intangibles -- our right to be loons, dissenters, conservatives, liberals, curmudgeons, or couch potatoes, as we please.
With it, we are free men and women: without it, we aren't much of anything at all, until we're told otherwise.
The attack on the First Amendment currently centers on the issue of campaign finance reform, which (however it's tarted up with high-falutin' oratory) remains a scarily transparent effort to nationalize the marketplace of ideas.
But campaign finance reform is a fringe issue, with little popular support. As such, it's only one front in a broad-based Democratic assault on First Amendment rights.
The free exercise of religion is also very much at stake.
For years, liberals have invoked grotesque misreadings of the establishment clause to assail everything from school vouchers to Christmas pageants.
Now, the Gore campaign has added a new twist, a 'Bob Jones' strategy that plays on the media caricature of the religious right as a mob of racist, theocratic clinic-bombers.
It's nothing less than a tactical war on the fundamental right of religious conservatives to participate in the civic life of the nation, not only as activists, but as voters.
This is left-McCarthyism at its nastiest, as venomous and intolerant as anything we've seen. Still, it plays well with certain core Democratic constituencies -- notably elite journalists, who tend to perceive religion through a veil of unapologetic bigotry. (They make an exception, naturally, for such men of faith as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.)
On another front, Democrats have spiced the campaign with zealous calls for 'hate crimes' legislation, which would empower the state to criminalize words and even thoughts. This eerie assault on the freedom of speech should alarm all civil libertarians.
So much for the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, thanks to National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, the left's passionate crusade against the Second Amendment took on new life this week.
Last Sunday on ABC, Mr. LaPierre spoke a little too bluntly about President Clinton's peculiar talent for making political hay of grief and violence.
The press responded with swift and predictable outrage: indeed, no Republican can now appear before a camera without immediately being instructed to denounce Mr. LaPierre and the NRA . This gives those nightly newscasts a creepy ambience, kind of like the Moscow Show Trials with beer commercials.
There's no small hypocrisy in this. For years, Beltway reporters have watched (aiding and abetting now and again) as Mr. Clinton deftly exploited such tragedies as the Oklahoma City bombing to score points against his political adversaries. They've chuckled about it amongst themselves -- they've even allowed whispers of it to slip into their reporting. If ever there was 'old news,' this is it.
But -- to the delight of Democratic strategists -- most establishment journalists don't like guns, and they don't like gun-owners. What's more, they think it's simply appalling that a bourgeois, 18th century document devised by a pack of politically-incorrect dead white guys should be allowed to stand in the way of the gun-control legislation they so passionately endorse.
All this has served, amazingly, to make a principled defense of the Second Amendment a political liability for Republicans.
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "[a] bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse."
Evidently, Mr. Gore doesn't agree. Should he win in November, it's a fair bet that his Supreme Court nominees won't agree, either.
Which brings us full circle. Despite the frenzy of hype and bile we'll have to endure in coming months, there are still ten simple reasons why we should care about this presidential contest.
Think of it this way. If they succeed in mowing down the first two, there are just eight more to go.
------------------
Slowpoke Rodrigo...he pack a gon...
Vote for the Neal Knox 13