New Mexico’s Democrat governor Grisham yesterday announced that the Second Amendment was null and void in Albuquerque for 30 days. The alleged justification for the action are the recent murders of some children, including an 11 year old. As far as that goes, this was just par for the course from Democrats – cynically exploiting the death of a child to advance their Leftist agenda; in this case, disarming the population. It was ridiculous in practical terms (the only possible people who would obey the order are those who would never murder anyone) but also an outrage against the Constitution. You really can’t just willy-nilly set aside its provisions.
What surprised everyone a bit was the number of prominent Democrats who came out to oppose the move. Not immediately – there was about a day between order and condemnation. This means someone quickly did some polling on the issue and found it catastrophically bad for Democrats. You know for certain their concern wasn’t the Constitution. Grisham is guilty of not only saying the quiet part out loud, but saying it before the Democrat party as a whole was prepared to defend it. But even with that, it is a huge problem.
The governor can be impeached. But the Legislature is controlled by Democrats. The State and local police could refuse to comply with an illegal order. But the cops most concerned – in Albuquerque – already announced they would enforce the rule. The Federal government can arrest the governor – as well as any staffers or police who cooperate with the order – on conspiracy to deny the civil rights of the people of New Mexico (this is actually a violation of US law; we really have enacted laws making it illegal to deny a person their civil rights…it has just never been enforced against a Democrat), but Pudding Brain’s DOJ won’t do that. So, we’re kinda stuck, aren’t we?
Sure, anyone arrested under the order can fight it in court and almost certainly they will prevail. Eventually. Could take a couple years, maybe longer. And what will they get after the fight? A court order nullifying the order, years after it went into effect (with maybe a judge ordering an injunction against its enforcement while the case winds its way through the courts). No penalty to the governor or for anyone who enforced the order. Lots of expense for those arrested on the basis of an illegal order. Nothing has more clearly shown that when the rubber meets the road, the Constitution is a mere scrap of paper…only in force as long as those with power agree to enforce it.
What we lack – and it is now a glaring lack, given that Democrats have dispensed with the Rule of Law – is any mechanism for enforcing the law – for securing our rights – when the government is actively working to oppress the people. A temporary fix is to get a GOP President in office willing to prosecute the governor. That would go a long way. But not all the way. In fact, might even make a Leftist hero out of her. And a GOPer won’t be President forever. Eventually, a Democrat gets back in and we’re back at square one.
It is a problem we’re going to have to deal with; the construction of mechanisms which allow the people to stop the government. Not quite sure how to go about this (some sort of Tribune like in ancient Rome?), but when all of the power is in the hands of people who don’t respect the law, we need something outside the law to stand between us and the government.
Democrats are increasingly angry over GOP governors shipping illegals to Blue cities. This means it is working; and we should not only keep it up, but increase the numbers. It is turning out to be a PR catastrophe for the Democrats…it is causing huge stress in Democrat cities (and among various Dem voting blocs) but the Democrats can’t seal the border to stop it because that would upset the far Left. They are in a pickle and it is gloriosu.
Senator Kennedy ripped into the Deputy Secretary of Energy over the price tag for getting us to “net zero” by 2050 and how nobody can say how much this will change the climate if we do it. It is in a lot of ways a grand effort by Kennedy but in the end, he lost the argument: because he conceded, repeatedly, that being “carbon neutral” is good; a goal we should achieve. We can’t do that – that is, we can’t even for a moment concede a point to the Democrats. All they believe are lies and we can’t go along with them.
There is no “climate crisis”.
Just as there is no “gun violence”. People are violent; guns are inanimate objects.
Abortion is not healthcare.
On and on like that.
Blogs For Victory 
This seems apropos given your first two paragraphs:
In the previous thread I brought up Calvin Coolidge and the prosperity of the 1920s, and one of our trolls promptly pounced, insinuating that the 20s did nothing more than pave the way for the Great Depression. Mark has probably forgotten more than I know about the depression that was avoided following WWI by the policies of Harding and Coolidge, the decade of prosperity that followed, and the causes of the Great Depression. That would make an interesting thread. IMHO, we could use a modern day Calvin Coolidge in the White House.
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”
“I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.”
“I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!”
Secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt Henry Morgenthau Jr. during the seventh year of the New Deal he helped FDR create to combat the rampant unemployment of the Great Depression.
Are you saying (or more to the point, was henry Morgenthau saying) that electing Democrats to fix the problems created by the prosperity of the “Roaring” Twenties not only didn’t fix the problem, it actually extended it?
Pretty much, yeah. Good catch! 😉
Not only was the 1920 crash worse and the depression deeper, it all quickly corrected itself once the underlying economic reasons were fixed.
What I had never thought of was the “morality” component, which actually fits in with my other observations about the Left claiming it represents moral superiority. Thus the stock market crash was viewed as a dividing line between the self-centered, self-deceiving 1920s and the intellectually and morally superior, albeit depressed, 1930s”. The difference seems to be the free market corrections of 1920 vs the Leftist intervention of 1929, which supposedly represented compassion and superior grasp of economics as well as rejection of the perceived excesses of the 20s.
There’s a little disconnect as the Left is associated with licentiousness in many forms while the Right is usually considered more restrained socially and sexually, but hey, when you need a narrative you create a narrative.
I don’t think licentiousness is limited to one party, but Republicans tend to ostracize their black sheep while Democrats tend to reward theirs with committee chairmanships (while continuing to claim the moral high ground).
I think Republicans prefer to keep their antics more private, while it is Lefties who prance around in buttless chaps mimicking (I hope!) degenerate sex in parades in front of children.
I think a poll of those who want graphically sexual material in grade school libraries and those who don’t would show an ideological divide.
Hollywood………
But it is still accepted as gospel that FDR cured the Depression. As Spook pointed out, I have yammered on quite a bit about this over the years – the Depression was caused by the wealth of a century being shot out a cannon while 10 million died in war, 20 million died of disease (and almost all fit, young people who would have hit their most productive and highest consumption years right around 1930) and that the Depression didn’t end because of WWII but because on that glad morn of 1945 all of America’s competitors were bankrupt or literally blown to pieces so if you wanted anything, you had to get it from us. And then to really hit the jackpot, the spread of immunization against childhood diseases radically dropped infant mortality and the world entered an unprecedented population boom.
But, really, the underlying problem remained – that the system of global credit based on gold-backed securities was wrecked by WWI. The more I think about it, the more crucial this becomes. It used to be that if you wanted to borrow money you had to actually borrow money. These days the big banks “borrow” money which was printed up at below market rate and then they lend this fake money out to others…and if everyone screws up on the investments, the government just prints up more and bails the banks out. It is a debt and inflation spiral and it continues to this day…I would have thought it would collapse some time ago but so far the various central banks in the largest economies have prevented hyper-inflation. How long can they keep that up? Perhaps for a while…but that sort of economy leads to the necessity of fast and high profits and that’s why we find ourselves paying ever higher prices for shoddier goods.
An X-friend (ie, someone I know on the site formerly known as Twitter) removed an old, cast iron tub the other day…it had the casting date of 6/1938 on it. Still in excellent condition. How’s that plastic tub you installed five years ago looking? But you can’t buy cast iron for paper – you can buy plastic for it, and so that’s what we get. And it doesn’t work nearly as well nor last even a tenth of the time…and now it is starting to cost as much as well made goods but we have to keep buying and buying and buying and buying and borrowing and printing and fudging the numbers and make sure there’s enough welfare so that nobody starves but what happens when the farmers decide they’ll only provide goods for goods?
Well, in the USSR they sent out commissars to murder farmers and steal the food.
Could get very interesting.
When Fujimori ran for the presidency of Peru, he had a brutally honest campaign. He told the people the only way out of their mess would mean it would have to get worse before it got better. He won, and he implemented his promises, and after a year or so the country was pulling itself out of its inflation and stagnation. I was in Peru during his campaign and saw his signs all over out in the country. Even the peasants understood what he was saying.
One of the things he did was crack down on terrorism. I was back in the country the day the American and Peruvian forces took back the Japanese Embassy, which had been overrun and occupied by Sendero Luminoso during the Christmas holiday party held there. I sat in a car out in the country listening to the radio and it sounded like a movie scene, with the announcer rapidly trying to describe what was going on and the sound of helicopters and machine guns in the background.
The young terrorists had been training every day to immediately run to their designated rooms of hostages to kill them all if a rescue was attempted, and the rescue was so well executed that several of the terrorists were gunned down as they ran up the stairs. Fuji was onsite and as soon as the building was secured he walked up the stairs, stepping over the body of a young girl, to illustrate that he was in control.
His hard-core efforts resulted in nearly shutting down Sendero, pushing its few remnants into the jungle and making the country a lot safer. (He and a buddy in government later got caught stealing and took off, leaving the nation to another Leftist president. I told my Peruvian friends they would have been better off just giving him a million dollars or two every year and keeping him in office, and they agreed.)
My point is, the people understood that the only way to fix inflation was to stop spending money, and they were willing to live with the belt-tightening and accompanying contraction of the economy until things were balanced out. The same thing happened in the United States after the 1920 Depression, when the market tightened up and things got tougher for a while, till the corrections took hold.
The Left’s conviction that they can “fix” things if they just DO enough has never worked—not here, not in Peru, not anywhere. The Left acts like it is King Midas, but everything it touches turns to crap.
New Mexico’s Democrat governor Grisham yesterday announced that the Second Amendment was null and void in Albuquerque for 30 days.
This could just be a trial run. I wouldn’t put it past Democrats to try such a thing, and if it gets shot down, no harm no foul. If, OTOH, it’s not successfully contested, which would be difficult to do in 30 days, it sets a dangerous precedent, that you can bet will be emulated by other blue states. Time will tell.
And the first time someone is killed because citizens were not allowed to legally carry weapons to defend him or her, then sue the absolute snot out of the official who made the decree.
If the Left wants to use lawfare, then let’s show them what lawfare really looks like!
From the comments section on an article about the Energy Secretary’s PR trip with EVs. It’s a pretty funny story but so is this:
Studies have shown that 90% of EVs are still on the road.
The rest made it home.