By Mr. Curmudgeon
The cities of Washington, D.C. and Chicago believe the U.S. Constitution does not apply to them. That they have the power to determine, through local legislation, what rights a citizen does or does not have. In Otis McDonald vs. City of Chicago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, “We have previously held that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply with full force to both the Federal Government and the States. Applying the standard that is well established in our case law, we hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States.”
Of the nine justices sitting on the high court, a slim majority, five, believe in the protections guaranteed to all Americans by the Constitution’s original ten amendments. In other words, only one justice saved the Constitutional rights you foolishly thought were sacred and secure.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the Second Amendment rights of Americans in all the states – were guaranteed under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Alito then backed up his claim by citing American history. Amazingly, it involves the right to bear arms in order to fight the violence and murder perpetrated by white militias in the Democrat-controlled post- Civil-War South.
When Congress was debating the Fourteenth Amendment in the late 1860s, Senator Samuel Pomeroy argued that the amendment guaranteed, “Every man . . . should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.” Pomeroy was a leading Radical Republican. We could sure use them now.
Alito cuts through the post-Civil-War Jim Crow anti-gun arguments. “First, while the Fourteenth Amendment contains ‘an antidiscrimination rule,’ namely, the Equal Protection Clause, municipal respondents can hardly mean that it does no more than prohibit discrimination. If that were so, then the First Amendment, as applied to the States, would not prohibit nondiscriminatory abridgments of the rights to freedom of speech or freedom of religion; the Fourth Amendment, as applied to the States, would not prohibit all unreasonable searches and seizures but only discriminatory searches and seizures—and so on.”
Lawyers fighting to defend gun bans insist the Constitution’s amendments only restrain the national government from infringing on individual rights…not necessarily the states and their cities. This argument relies on an infamous Supreme Court ruling of 1876 – United States vs. Cruikshank.
On Easter Sunday, 1873, a mob of white militiamen attacked a group of 280 African-American Republicans gathered in Colfax, Louisiana. The black Republicans were attempting to prevent Democrats from stealing an election (sound familiar?). Unfortunately, only a few blacks were armed to defend themselves.
The well-armed white militia eventually rounded up their prisoners and summarily executed them. The event became known as the Colfax Massacre. Only a handful of the killers were ever tried. Jim Crow juries eventually acquitted all.
In the Cruikshank decision, the high court ruled that the federal government had no power to uphold the Constitutional rights of a state’s citizens (specifying the Second Amendment rights of African-Americans) – that was up to the individual states. The ruling is credited with encouraging the growth of white paramilitary groups in the South. Some historians describe the 19th Century’s White League of Louisiana as “the military arm of the Democratic Party.”
It is fitting that the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Second Amendment should bear the name of Otis McDonald. An African-American living in Chicago, McDonald works with local authorities to rid his neighborhood of drug dealers and their violence. This made McDonald a high profile target for the gangs. McDonald kept a handgun in his home in case he was forced to send a drug-dealing “polluted wretch to another world.” The City of Chicago took McDonald’s weapon and prosecuted him. It’s unlikely they did the same to the gangs terrorizing McDonald’s neighborhood.
By expanding the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, denying states the power to cherry-pick, Jim Crow-like, what Constitutional rights citizens can or cannot have, the U.S. Supreme Court rights horrible Democratic Party wrongs, past and present.
“It is so ordered.”
