By Ian Tuttle
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
More than 40 Democrats are currently staging a “sit-in”
in the House chamber. “Staging” is the appropriate term, because this is not
political “action”; it’s political theater. The refusal of the House’s
Republican leadership to bring up a gun-control bill for a vote — the
ostensible cause of this grandstanding — is not denying anyone their rights and
isn’t “unjust.” The well of the House isn’t a Montgomery lunch counter in 1960.
But nostalgic Democrats long ago figured out that, when all else fails, invoke
Selma. So, predictably, John Lewis — who once upon a time knew what actual
civil-rights violations looked like — is spearheading this farce, and Sheila
Jackson-Lee, never one to miss a moment of hyperbole, is calling on Congress to
“break the shackles.”
This episode is a neat little demonstration of just how
topsy-turvy the moral universe of the Democratic party has become. What they
are actually demanding, in the form of a “no-buy” list of the sort proposed by
Senator Chris Murphy in his filibuster last week (14 hours of theater that had
even Philip Glass fans in the Slough of Despond), is the abrogation of American
citizens’ Fifth Amendment rights in order to then strip them of their Second
Amendment rights. Meanwhile, anyone who uses their First Amendment right to
oppose this scheme is accused of wanting to sell guns to ISIS (as Murphy and
Elizabeth Warren have both said). It would be difficult to think of a better demonstration
of Democrats’ wholehearted embrace of an ends-justify-the-means philosophy of
governing.
What is more, Democrats refuse to acknowledge that their
end here simply is not popular. There is no indication that Congress is on
board with these sorts of proposals — as indicated by the failure of all four
bills in the Senate earlier this week — and the American electorate has a
strongly favorable view of the Second Amendment. The approval rating of the
much-maligned NRA is higher than that of Congress, either party, or either of
the two major presidential candidates. The Democrats are engaging in pure,
undiluted moral showmanship.
Alas, it looks like they’re set to keep this charade up —
California senator Barbara Boxer recently arrived with a box of granola bars
(ETA of juice boxes unknown) — so the next several hours promise to be full of
sanctimonious garment-rending and breathless, wall-to-wall reporting about what
a “historic” occasion this is. Which, for those concerned about keeping a
constitutional republic, it is.
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