I'm Dreaming of a Libertarian Obama
David Weigel | February 15, 2008, 3:38pm
Jeffrey Rosen
pens a short essay in
The New Republic arguing that Barack Obama can be, in Rosen's words, "the first civil libertarian president."
After Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he defended individual rights in a way that might have marginalized him: He joined only two other senators in voting against a bill to forbid convicts on probation from having contact with street gangs, and he voted against a bill to expand the death penalty to gang-related murders. But Obama nevertheless won the respect of police and prosecutors in Chicago by building those "alliances of consent." One of his greatest legislative triumphs was a bill to require the videotaping of all confessions and interrogations in capital cases. Initially, police, state prosecutors, and the newly elected Democratic governor were strongly opposed, some death-penalty abolitionists viewed the bill as too moderate, and legislators were afraid of being soft on crime. But Obama led daily negotiations (without reporters) during which he emphasized his opponents' common values. At the end, the bill had the support of all parties, passed unanimously, and today has been adopted as a model by four states and the District of Columbia.
There's more recent stuff and a hashing-out of how John McCain would attack Obama on this front. Rosen expects Obama to parry better than Dukakis did versus Bush; I agree, and I think the criminal issues that sunk Dukakis have less salience than the war on terror issues that inflame the gonads of the McCain Right. I heard way too many arguments that the
PATRIOT Act vote would sink Russ Feingold or the wireless wiretap debate would save Denny Haster's job to take that line too seriously.
But what about those other liberties? Aswini Aburajan
reports from Obama's last presser, which came after the NIU killings.
Asked to comment on Cheney's decision to add his signature to a brief supported by 55 senators and 250 congressmen to have the Supreme Court overturn a ban on handguns by the District of Columbia, Obama said he wasn't familiar with the statements made by either the Vice President or members of Congress.
However, he went on to defend the right of municipalities to establish their own handgun laws. "The city of Chicago has gun laws, so does Washington, D.C.," Obama said. "The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can't initiate gun safety laws to deal with gangbangers and random shootings on the street isn't born out by our constitution." Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty is an endorser of Obama.
Asked to elaborate on his understanding of what the second amendment actually means, Obama said that he does believe the second amendment "speaks to an individual's right." But he said that right could be "subject to common-sense regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense regulation. So I think there's a lot of room before you [sic] bumping against a constitutional barrier for us to institute some of the common-sense gun laws."
So: Obama is a civil libertarian, except when he is not.
LarryA | February 15, 2008, 6:14pm | #
obama is as libertarian as ron paul is president
Please note that “civil libertarians” are people who say they support civil liberties. This has no relation to the political philosophy, libertarian, which supports minimal government.
Obama is an ACLU-bertarian.
I'm old enough to remember when stating that the Second Amendment was an individual right was an eccentric position, one libertarians urged public officials to adopt, with little success.
And I’m old enough to remember when the right to keep and bear arms was treated the same way all the other rights are.
When I graduated high school (1965) almost every high school in
New York City had a rifle team. Students carried their rifles to and from school on the subway, and got about as much notice as the band kid with a trombone.
Anyway, the individual interpretation isn’t “eccentric” any more, or Hillary and Barack wouldn’t be claiming to believe in it.
I mean a government can't ban guns from courthouses?
What’s so special about a courthouse? Why should you want to encourage multiple random murders there? Other than the high probability lawyers will be involved, that is.
How does banning concealed carry prevent either keeping or bearing arms?
We’ve had the concealed v open carry debate before. One reason is that requiring open carry allows law enforcement to harass minorities they think shouldn’t carry. Another is that criminals can open fire on those carrying first, eliminating resistance.
Obama's a relative newcomer to federal government, so he doesn't have years and years of cronies built up, and he likely will have trouble getting his own ideas passed.
Does he have any ideas of his own?
insisting that there would be no newt axes
Gingrich is back? [Sorry, I couldn’t resist.]
The Supreme Court ruled as far back as the 1930s that the 2nd Amendment was a collective right, intended to allow the formation of state militias.
Self-contradictory. Members of state militias were, and still are, expected to show up bearing their own firearms. See
Texas State Guard. IOW, “We need state and local militias to secure the government, therefore individuals must be armed.”
LarryA | February 19, 2008, 11:59am | #
A google search on "collective right gun control" produces 171,000 hits. So far, every single of them identified "collective right" as referring to the idea that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms to the militia, and every single one of them describes how the reasoning is traced back to Miller.
I suppose they would, given the paucity of other sources for the idea. You certainly can’t find it in the writings of those who signed the Declaration or the Constitution, nor in Supreme Court cases that followed. Arguing that one SCOTUS case established a precedent found nowhere else isn’t the best way to win the “collective right is the only reasonable interpretation” debate.
I will agree with joe that various courts have used it to rule against gun rights.
But it doesn’t make as much difference as you think. Given that forty-four of the fifty states have a state constitutional right to keep and bear arms, it’s obvious that the reasonable way to provide for a state militia is to guarantee an individual right.
Now that SCOTUS is poised to rule in an unequivocal Second Amendment case, we’ll see what they think c. 2008.
As I understand it, it was assumed that every individual had a right to arms, and that this was set forth even in English common law.
Sort of true. It was an individual right, but Catholics were excluded. Earlier than that bearing arms was an obligation, rather than a right.
If the state of Texas created a well regulated citizen militia consisting of all citizens, and armed those citizens with machine guns, would they have the right to keep and bear arms in the collective?
They’d still have an individual right. The
Texas Constitution has an RKBA provision, as do the constitutions of 43 other states. Article 1, Section 23:
Every citizen shall have the right to keep and bear arms in the lawful defense of himself or the State; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.
A group of retired military officers, mostly Generals or Admirals, has filed an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller.
Now, if they’d only allow concealed carry on military bases...
I haven’t read their brief yet, but another reason civilian RKBA is important is manufacturing capability. The military is expending enormous amounts of small arms ammo in Iraq, far beyond the usual government contractors’ ability to resupply. To replace the ammo they have let contracts to manufacturers who primarily supply cartridges to the civilian market, and whose capability to take up the slack wouldn’t exist were it not for the Second Amendment.
As a result, we gun owners are paying higher prices for ammo, and making a contribution above what everyone is paying in taxes. But we aren't bitching. Military families are paying a much higher amount.
Senator Obama states that cities have the right to impose their own handgun bans. Does he also believe cities can pass their own racial segregation laws?
No. Any policy that creates de-facto racial disparity is unconstitutional, except for the gun control loophole. It’s okay to discriminate on the basis of disarming the wrong people. For examples see the gun registration schemes of New York City and Los Angeles County. This response is Obama and ACLU approved.
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