Much like the attack on Rank Choice Voting (RCV) in Maine, the The New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse reports on a favored phrase of Republican-appointed judges and justices, and so I see memes are an important part of the Republican arsenal of weapons:
Why is this happening, and why now? To understand why the “second-class right” meme is suddenly penetrating the judicial conversation, we have to begin with Justice Clarence Thomas. He is not the first member of the current Supreme Court to use the phrase; Justice Samuel Alito Jr. used it in his 2010 opinion that extended the analysis of the Heller decision, which had applied only to Washington, D.C., as a federal enclave, to the states. The court was being asked, Justice Alito wrote in McDonald v. City of Chicago, “to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right,” which he said the court would not do.
But it is Justice Thomas who has taken up the phrase as a weapon, using it in a series of opinions over the past four years to accuse his colleagues of failing in their duty to keep pushing back against limitations on gun ownership and use. The opinions were all dissents from the court’s decisions not to hear particular gun-rights appeals.
Followed by echoes in the inferior Federal courts by conservative judges. (For forgetful types, like myself, the 2nd Amendment to the American Constitution is “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.“)
This approach of corrupting honest debate by linking arguments temporally and geographically distributed arguments using emotional phrasing (which is something I deliberately do every time I suggest the GOP is a bunch of second-raters – and I do believe that) is the mark of a sophisticated social messaging campaign. It may not be targeted at the general public, but the community of lawyers is big enough to make it worthwhile. And what entity has made a name for itself in this area?
In light of this previous posting on the possibilities of malicious, anonymous Russian interference in American culture, which I still freely admit is brightly, even enjoyably paranoid, one is left to wonder if the far-right members of the judiciary are being manipulated, to their knowledge or not, by the Russians. After all, it makes little sense to arm teachers, to arm the mentally ill, to make high powered firearms available to those with undetected mental illness – or of a murderous temperament, if that does not fit into the category of mental illness. People are habitually careless and sometimes malicious. We need to understand this. These surprising statements about the 2nd Amendment from Justices Thomas and Alito, an Amendment over which appropriate readings remain highly controversial – and decidedly so, given its ambiguous form – is hardly an acceptable approach to the issue. It ignores the Amendment’s ambiguities and attempts to extend the possibly absurd interpretations as if they’re a settled societal matter – an assertion that is pointedly false.
And that extension of which I spoke leads to my last point. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, we are a country of limited rights, not unlimited rights. For example, yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater may be an example of speech, but if there’s no fire, then your free speech rights do not protect you from arrest, conviction, and punishment.
Therefore, there is nothing wrong with suggesting the right to arms is limited, for if we don’t, then every nitwit with a grudge and a few bucks could go out and buy a full-fledged machine gun. Every attempt to make it illegal would fall under the Alito / Thomas reasoning. And the toll in Las Vegas would have been far higher than the “mere” 50+ we so sadly suffered on that cursed night.
The second-rate meme is a feint, a magician’s trick to distract attention from the real issue of limited rights by slyly invoking emotional thinking in a context that cries out for rational analysis. I use that meme as a descriptive insult of the GOP, supported by the evidence of the last 8 years; these conservative judges are using it as a distraction from the real issues of mass killings of children and adults, a situation which sows chaos in our society – and division in our shared heart.
