Category Archives: Second Amendment

Two new women members of Floridas State Board of Education made their debuts Wednesday, revealing a conservative to far-right bent that could foreshadow their priorities for the states public school system and its 2.8-million students.

Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Esther Byrd and Grazie Pozo Christie in mid-March, just before the 2022 legislative session was ending.

Byrd, from Duval County, used her first board meeting to signal to Floridians that she will be fighting ideology within Florida schools.

Im just a mama and the parent of two children ones graduated and one in second grade, Byrd said Wednesday. And weve seen the ideology thats in our education system and its not okay. And I look forward to working with this board to make sure that we find those things and we tackle them.

Her comments came during the Board of Educations meeting in Naples, in Southwest Florida.

Byrds appointment in March sparked controversy, as her social media posts appeared to be supportive of far-right causes, such as the white nationalist group, the Proud Boys, and the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection.

The Florida Times-Union media outlet, located in Jacksonville, reported in mid-March: Byrd most notably landed in the public eye for her tweetssupporting the Capitol insurrection as well as the QAnon conspiracy theory anddefending the Proud Boys. A photo of theByrds flying a QAnon flag on their boat was widely circulated last year.

Byrd is the wife of Republican state Rep. Cord Byrd, and she currently serves as a legal assistant and office manager for his law firm, which appears to focus on Second Amendment cases, according to the offices website. (The language in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution includes: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.)

She also served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2002 to 2010, according to a March press release from the governors office.

Byrd continued her remarks at the board meeting Wednesday:

If I could just speak to the Floridians for just a secondI want you to know one thing: these people (the Board of Education) are not bureaucrats. They are not just here, you know, getting paid by taxpayer dollars. They care about what they do. They care about the kids, and serving Floridians, and through my orientation and the short time that Ive been involved, I have been so impressed with all of the staff and how much they genuinely care about what theyre doing.

The other newcomer is Grazie Pozo Christie of Miami, who is a radiologist. She currently is heavily involved with Catholic organizations such as The Catholic Association which describes itself in part on its website as defending religious liberty, life, and the Church in the public square.

Her Twitter account currently is comprised mostly of anti-abortion tweets or retweets. Christie posted a reference on her Twitter page, claiming that late term abortion is never medically necessary.

Outside of the abortion front, she also weighed in on divisive legislation now in law the so-called Dont Say Gay measure limiting the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools.

When White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said Tuesday that the bill will have tragic impact, Christie, who supports the bill, tweeted: Tragic impact on child groomers and deranged ideologue kindergarten teachers.

On Wednesday, at the state board meeting, Christie said she was surprised but honored to be appointed to the state Board of Education.

Also I very much admire in the way that the governor and this board and the Department of Education has put a real focus on parental rights, on transparency, on doing for children and young adults, what they need, which is to educate them, Christie said Wednesday. To educate them to be ready for the great challenge of living a successful life out in the workforce and building great families. And I think thats what education ought to be about and thats what I feel this board is doing.

Both newcomers expressed their disappointment of not being able to work with current Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, who is expected to step down in late April.

Im sorry I wont be working with you, Commissioner, Christie said.

Corcoran spent the first part of the meeting giving his farewell comments to the board, thanking the board members and department staff.

Though maintaining composure, Corcoran seemed emotional in his remarks.

This is, in all likelihood, the last full board meeting I would participate in as your commissioner. Its been a great run, Corcoran said.

He added: Ive said it at the last meeting: I dont think theres a finer board in the state. I dont think theres a board thats had more adversity thrown their way, more controversy. Our meetings are probably the most lively of any meetings in the state and you guys, you know what you believe, you know what your philosophy is and you have the courage to fight for it.

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New Board of Ed members show conservative bent; Byrd says ideology in FL school system 'not okay' - Florida Phoenix

This article was first published in theState of Faith newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Monday night.

Last week, Deseret News and The Marist Poll released their first Faith in America survey, which explored religions evolving role in American life. So far, Ive used the new data to write about some of the reasons why people are less interested in organized religion today than they were in the past and Americans beliefs about wearing religious attire in public.

My teammates have also contributed articles and columns to the ongoing project. Jennifer Graham discussed anxieties surrounding the concept of a post-Christian society and Mya Jaradat explored the enduring popularity of the golden rule.

Despite the quantity (and quality!) of these stories, my colleagues and I have only scratched the surface of whats in the Faith in America survey report. For this weeks newsletter, I wanted to highlight a few other fascinating data points that havent yet made it into a Deseret News story.

Around 1 in 5 U.S. adults (22%) report that their religious beliefs and faith-related activities play a major role in their social network. An additional 28% say religion plays a more minor role.

Republicans (35%) are nearly twice as likely as Democrats (18%) and Independents (18%) to report their religion plays a major role in deciding with whom they spend time, researchers noted.

More than half of U.S. adults (55%) believe the Constitution, as a whole, was inspired by God, according to the Deseret-Marist poll. Similar shares of Americans said the same about the First Amendment (free speech and freedom of religion), 15th Amendment (voting rights for Black men) and 19th Amendment (voting rights for women).

Americans are less confident about divine support for the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. The survey showed that just 37% of U.S. adults say the Second Amendment is inspired by God.

Oprah may be a hugely popular celebrity, but shes not a common source of moral guidance. Just 1 in 10 U.S. adults look to her for tips on how to live a moral life, the Deseret-Marist poll found.

In the legal context, stay refers to a court decision that halts a legal proceeding. In most cases, stays are only temporary; they expire once various details are worked out.

Stays often come up in death penalty cases, since those typically involve many requests for delay. A court might stay an execution to give parties involved the time needed to address lingering questions.

Last week, the Supreme Court granted a partial stay in an ongoing battle over the Navys COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The decision will allow Navy officials to temporarily refuse to deploy unvaccinated service members. Previously, district and appeals court judges had ruled that the Navy could not take any adverse action against people with religious concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines.

My friend Daniel Silliman recently completed a once-in-a-career assignment: investigating instances of sexual harassment within his own organization. He wrote about allegations against two former Christianity Today leaders and how the organization spent years protecting those men instead of the people concerned about their behavior. Slate recently spoke with Silliman about covering abuse at CT and elsewhere.

This years St. Peters Peacocks may be out of the March Madness basketball tournament, but theyll live on in my heart. If the same is true for you, check out Religion Unpluggeds look at the scrappy, Roman Catholic school.

I really enjoyed The New York Times look at the story behind one of the most shared photos from Ketanji Brown Jacksons confirmation hearings.

The Deseret News recently published an interesting look at the land on which the Washington D.C. temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was built.

If you have room in your heart and brain for more survey data, check out this new report from the Survey Center on American Life on Gen Z and the future of faith.

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Was the Constitution inspired by God? Is Oprah a spiritual leader? - Deseret News

Its a tough time for gun safety in general. The Supreme Court decided to take a look at New York regulations that set a pretty high bar on the right to, say, carry a revolver in your pocket when you go out for a walk. Nobody knows whats going to happen. The Supreme Court keeps me up at night. For all kinds of reasons, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told me.

Lawmakers from Connecticut tend to be very concerned about this kind of issue, an obsession that goes back to 2012, when a 20-year-old stole his mothers gun and then killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, 20 of them children.

The Newtown shooting shocked the world, and many of us simpletons that we were presumed it would be the start of a whole new American attitude toward guns.

Certainly didnt imagine that this month wed be watching activists, many of them survivors of the Parkland high school shooting in 2018, place 1,100 body bags on the National Mall. Each bag stood for about 150 lives lost to guns since Parkland including homicides, accidental gun deaths and suicides. Organizers said there was no way to include one for each victim since that would have meant 170,000 body bags.

And hows Biden, who clearly sees himself as a champion of gun safety regulation, doing? It depends on what your expectations were, Blumenthal said, carefully. While many anti-gun activists say theyve been disappointed, Blumenthal still has a lot of hope. Hes more passionate and determined than any president in my memory, the senator said.

Definitely more than the guy who came before. Like most New Yorkers, Donald Trump sympathized with gun control for most of his life. Then he began making political speeches and told people he was stunned stunned! by how enthusiastic Republican crowds got if you gave a shout-out for the right to bear arms. Instant switcheroo.

Bidens been consistent, if not always successful. His first attempt to name a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives imploded when the Second Amendment lobby managed to torpedo the nomination of gun control activist David Chipman last year. Either this was impossible to win or the strategy failed, Chipman said afterward an analysis that could be used for many, many administration encounters with the United States Senate.

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Opinion | We Cant Get Even Regular Gun Control. How Are We Going to Deal With Ghost Guns? - The New York Times

As we continue our way through campaign season for the local primary elections on May 3, there are a few important dates to be aware of between now and then.

Monday, April 4, is the final day to register to vote to be able to vote the following month.

April 13 is the day early voting begins at the Madison County Election Commission (311 North Parkway), and that will be available April 13-28 from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. Monday through Friday (except on April 15) and 9 a.m. until noon on Saturday.

But before all that, theres another important date to put on your calendar: April 7. Its on that day The Sun will partner with WNBJ and Jackson State Community College to host a mayoral forum in the McWherter Center on Jackson States campus (2046 North Parkway).

The forum will begin at 6:30 p.m. and be done by 8. WNBJs Christen Hyde and I will ask the candidates questions pertinent to the issues in Madison County.

All four candidates have been invited and have indicated they will be present.

If you can be there, feel free to join us. Weve got nearly 200 seats open for you. If you cant be there, the crew at WNBJ will be set up for a broadcast on Facebook Live on their page that well share on ours.

Well ask them about their concerns, plans, hopes and dreams for the county under their leadership.

Theyll be presented with questions pertinent to the job of mayor so dont expect questions related to abortion, the Second Amendment, marriage equality or any other national hot button issues.

Ive seen some comments on social media and heard about comments being made in verbal conversations on the campaign trail, and the voters need to learn about the races and the candidates. For one, this is a race for County Mayor. Scott Conger probably appreciates expressions of support he gets when any of the candidates speak or make social media posts about running for the position, but hes the Mayor of Jackson and isnt running for county mayor, so supporting Conger and supporting one of these candidates can happen from the same person.

The No. 1 thing that needs to happen before all of the elections the voters needs to be as knowledgeable as possible about the candidates, and this is a great opportunity to find out about the candidates looking to represent this county as its mayor.

While a county mayor doesnt have the almost unilateral power the Jackson Mayor does, it is a key role in the process of recruiting industries and other businesses, advocating for the county to state and sometimes federal leadership and is in constant discussion with the county commissioners, who are the ones that ultimately make important decisions for the county as at least 13 of the 25 of its members have to agree with anything the mayor wants to do.

And with Madison County and all of rural West Tennessee being on the cusp of potentially the most important time in local history with an apparently obvious opportunity for prosperity, having the right people in the right positions of leadership is essential to the area living up to that potential.

So this is a great time to hear from them.

Then the candidates will have another opportunity to do the same thing at Union as The Jackson Chamber is hosting a forum of its own at Union University on April 26. More details on that event later.

Well have more coverage throughout the month of April regarding other elections too, including County Commission races that will have contested primaries and the race for Sheriff.

Good luck to all the candidates and thank you for being willing to serve in whatever capacity for which youre running.

Brandon Shields is the editor of The Jackson Sun. Reach him at bjshields@jacksonsun.com. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at editorbrandon.

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Learn about candidates before casting votes in the next few weeks | Opinion - The Jackson Sun

What To Know Today

Judge Jackson on crime and guns. The Supreme Court nominees judicial record on firearms is scant in her brief time on the D.C. Court of Appeals, she hasnt issued a ruling on gun rights. But during her second day of confirmation hearings, Jackson reaffirmed her view on Second Amendment precedent and fleshed out her perspective on public safety issues:

Hearings resume today.

Wyoming makes it illegal for state officials to enforce unconstitutional federal gun laws. Republican Governor Mark Gordon signed the bill prohibiting state officials from enforcing federal regulations of firearms, accessories, magazines, and ammunition. Any public officer who knowingly fails to comply faces some of the harshest punishments for violation in the nation: guilty of misdemeanor, a fine of $2,000, or both. The law, which goes into effect this summer, is similar to Missouris Second Amendment Sanctuary Law, now the subject of state and federal lawsuits. At least eight additional states with GOP-controlled legislatures passed similar laws last year. But unlike Missouris and Wyomings, most excluded penalty provisions, making them largely symbolic.

A tragic intersection of mental illness, homelessness, and gun violence. A Washington, D.C., man faces murder charges for allegedly shooting Morgan Holmes in early March before traveling to New York City and killing Abdoulaye Coulibaly. Both victims were unhoused. The New York Times offers a searching deep-dive on the tragedy and its effects. The spasms of bloodshed came as the two cities grappled with intertwined crises of homelessness and untreated mental illness that have grown more acute during the pandemic, and have also faced rising gun violence, the report reads. But crises, even citywide ones, are made up of individual tragedies and of families who are quietly enduring years of worry and pain.

Listen: How advocates in one Portland neighborhood are using orange traffic barrels for violence reduction. In the Mount Scott Arleta neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, which was hit particularly hard by the pandemic shooting surge, local advocates experimented with environmental design. To prevent people from committing violence, they used the cones to discourage would-be shooters from quickly driving into and out of neighborhoods. OPB spoke with three advocates behind the program who believe it contributed to a concurrent shooting decrease.

54 percent the average answer of Americans when asked what share of Americans own a gun. Thats according to a recent YouGov poll, which demonstrates that Americans frequently overestimate or underestimate the size of demographic groups. In fact, about 32 percent of Americans own guns. [YouGov]

CORRECTION: Mondays bulletin stated that the city of Baltimore allocated $50 million from its American Rescue Plan Act funds to ReBUILD Metro, a nonprofit. While ReBUILD advocated for the money, it did not directly receive it. The allocation will be used to tackle vacancy across the city, including communities ReBUILD serves.

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Daily Bulletin: Ketanji Brown Jackson's Commitment to Precedent on the Second Amendment - The Trace

CHEYENNE Gov. Mark Gordon signed the Second Amendment Protection Act into law Monday, with the support of law enforcement in attendance. The bill passed during the Wyoming Legislatures recently concluded 2022 budget session.

It is designed to protect Second Amendment rights, as well as prevent federal regulation of firearms, accessories, magazines and ammunition. Sheriffs, officers, gun rights advocates and lawmakers said the legislation was needed as President Joe Bidens administration pushes for such control.

This is a culmination of a lot of effort with law enforcement, gun owners in Wyoming, Shooting Sports Foundation, all those people that have a strong belief in the Second Amendment, bill sponsor Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, said at the signing.

We hope that the federal government will never do an unconstitutional act that would infringe upon peoples Second Amendment right.

The bill clearly states public officers are prohibited from enforcing, administering or cooperating with an unconstitutional act of any kind, and sets one of the harshest punishments for violation in the nation. An individual who knowingly violates the law is guilty of misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for up to one year, a fine of up to $2,000, or both.

Nothing in the act can limit or restrict an officer from providing assistance to federal authorities or accepting federal funds for law enforcement purposes.

We stand strong together to hold ourselves and our officers accountable to not enforce, administer or cooperate with any unconstitutional acts, said Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police Executive Board President and Rock Springs Police Chief Dwane Pacheco. This is one of the most important legislative actions on a personal and professional level that I have seen in my career.

Pacheco testified throughout the session in support of the bill, which moved forward in the process instead of the Second Amendment Preservation Act filed on both the House and Senate sides. The legislation was similar to the bill signed into law, but would have set harsher punishments for violators and put members of law enforcement at risk of civil action by citizens. In the end, this alternative plan failed introduction because legislators in opposition said they were concerned about possible repercussions for public officers.

The Second Amendment Protection Act instead passed with a large majority. The House passed Senate File 102 on third reading 43-15, and the Senate concurred 22-7.

This is an honor to be able to sign this bill, Gordon said. I thank everyone who worked on this bill to get it to my desk. It joins the Firearms Freedom Act. Its a very strong statement of Wyoming appreciation for Second Amendment rights and the constitutional opportunities to use firearms.

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Gordon signs Second Amendment Protection bill | Regional News | thesheridanpress.com - The Sheridan Press

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Warren County should be second amendment sanctuary - Indianola Independent Advocate

In his State of the Union address earlier this month, President Biden highlighted his comprehensive strategy to reduce gun violence. He emphasized the $350 billion in American Rescue Plan funds that weve made available for cities, counties, and states that enable them to hire more police and invest in proven strategies like community violence intervention. He talked about our efforts to crack down on difficult-to-trace ghost guns, part of an aggressive array of executive actions to reduce gun violence, taking more steps than any other Administration in its first year. And he repeated his call for Congress to take further action tackle the gun violence epidemic that continues to take more than 100 lives each day.

We have made strong progress by rolling out and executing on the Presidents comprehensive gun crime reduction strategy. This strategy contains five key components:

You can read a full summary of the progress weve made here. We are pulling all of the levers of the federal government to address this crisis. For example:

That progress is made possible by the dedicated gun violence prevention team we have at the White House, working to combat gun violenceevery day, from every angle. Under the leadership of Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, I coordinate the White Houses gun violence work. The solutions to gun violence are interdisciplinary, which is why we have built a multi-faceted, 12-person team of experts here in the heart of the Domestic Policy Council who have teamed up to drive forward our gun violence reduction agenda.

Chiraag Bains (Deputy Assistant to the President for Racial Justice and Equity), Vanessa Chen (Special Assistant to the President for Criminal Justice and Guns), and Stephonn Alcorn (Associate Director for Racial Justice and Equity) all bring their expertise in criminal justice reform and racial justice to help guide our work to expand community violence interventions. I work side by side with this team, along with Erin Murphy (Senior Policy Advisor for Criminal Justice), on broader issues related to public safety that often intersect with gun violence.

Vanessa leads our interagency policy council on school safety, working closely with Mo-Tracey Mooney, Special Assistant to the President for Education and the Domestic Policy Councils expert on K-12 education.

Were also fortunate to have Terri Tanielian (Special Assistant to the President for Veterans Affairs), who specializes in veteran issues, mental health, and suicide prevention, supporting our work on reducing access to lethal means through methods such as safe storage.

And, Pronita Gupta (Special Assistant to the President for Labor and Workers), ensures that job training and job opportunities for young adults and formerly incarcerated individuals are a core component of our comprehensive approach to reducing gun crime.

Jessica Schubel, Director for the Affordable Care Act and Health Care, contributes her expertise in utilizing Medicaid and private insurance to support violence intervention programs.

Priya Singh, Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Analyst, and Clarence Wardell, Senior Advisor for Delivery, specialize in bridging the gap between policy and people, including making sure that our investments in community violence intervention are having an impact on the ground.

Last but not least, Erin Pelton, Special Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff for the Domestic Policy Council, helps shape our legislative, public engagement, and intergovernmental affairs strategies.

All of us on the Domestic Policy Council work closely with our colleagues in the White House Counsels Office, the Office of Public Engagement, the Office of Legislative Affairs, and the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. And each of us coordinates with our counterparts in key agencies across government, from the Department of Justice to the Department of Education to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Together, we convene multi-agency meetings to coordinate on a specific goal, hold one-on-one meetings to drive the work of a particular agency, and meet with gun violence survivors and experts, as well as state and local policymakers.

The strength of this integrated approach is that it enables us to see across issue areas, and avoid the silos that too often stymie progress. When the Presidents top advisors were hammering out the details of his Build Back Better Agenda, our team ensured that it included a historic $5 billion across the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services to invest in community violence intervention. When workforce training was on the agenda, we were able to work with the Department of Labor to prioritize employment for formerly incarcerated individuals to reduce recidivism. After Medicaid policy advisors at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services briefed states on how Medicaid funds could be used to reimburse CVI programs, Connecticut and Illinois became the first two states to adopt this promising approach. Policymakers often talk about taking a whole-of-government approach to an issue. This is what a whole-of-government effort truly looks like in practice.

Driven by President Bidens career-long commitment to combating gun violence, and guided every day by the Presidents top advisor on domestic policy, our team is able to combine a deep focus on this issue with the ability to deliver on it across the White House and the Administration as a whole. Thats how weve been able to carry out a comprehensive gun crime reduction strategy thats done more through executive action than any President in their first year in history, and how weve backed it up with historic amounts of funding for cities and states to make their communities safer. And thats also how weve continued to amplify the voices of survivors and advocates and elevate them with the Presidents bully pulpit from the halls of Congress to the Rose Garden the vital need for Congress to act on common sense gun violence prevention measures.

As the President acknowledged in his State of the Union remarks, there is much more to do, which is why this team wakes up every day eager to advance this essential work. The President will continue to implement his comprehensive gun crime reduction strategy. Just as he did in his State of the Union Address, he will continue to call on Congress to takes steps that cannot be achieved through executive action and do not violate the Second Amendment like universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons with high-capacity magazines, and repeal of the liability shield for gun manufacturers and dealers. He will continue to increase investments in community policing and community violence interventions. And we will help him get the job done in order to save lives.

Stefanie Feldman is Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to the Domestic Policy Advisor

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Taking on Gun Crime and Violence with a Whole-of-Government Approach - The White House

Elie Mystal, attorney and author of the New York Times bestseller "Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution," wanted actor Samuel L. Jackson to record the audio version of his book. Mystal's title, after all, is drawn from one of Jackson's famous lines in "Pulp Fiction." But if you've seen Mystal on cable news, you know he doesn't need Jackson to provide passion and emphatic delivery. Mystal gives you all that and more, as you will see first-hand in our recent "Salon Talks" conversation.

Mystal takes, shall we say, the controversial position that the U.S. Constitution is not only "not good," but that it's "actually trash." He notes that our founding document was drafted by men who owned slaves and enshrined that evil institution with the infamous Fugitive Slave Clause and the "three-fifths compromise." But Mystal's bigger point is that our Constitution is given too much deference: "We act like this thing was kind of etched in stone by the finger of God, when actually it was hotly contested and debated, scrawled out over a couple of weeks in the summer in Philadelphia in 1787, with a bunch of rich, white politicians making deals with each other."

Mystal also lays bare the myth that the motivation behind the Second Amendment was about self-defense or a check on the government. As he notes, George Mason then the governor of Virginia and one of the drafters of the Constitution flat-out said that the Second Amendment was meant to guarantee that Southern states could form a "well-regulated militia" to "fight slave revolts." Mason and other Southerners feared that the federal government wouldn't help them put down slave uprisings, and they needed to have guns close at hand.

Mystal also shared his views on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and her ongoing confirmation hearings. As Mystal explains, the GOP has "nothing on her record that they can attack" and only has one card to play: racism. "Because they can't find anything wrong, they go to all of these other kind of racist smear campaigns because, frankly, racism always works for them," Mystal said.

This following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You were recently on "The View" talking about your book and created some controversy. The first line in "Let Me Retort" is "Our constitution is not good," followed up a few paragraphs later with "Our constitution is actually trash." You're obviously trying to challenge people. Tell people what your goal is there.

There are two things going on there. One, the veneration that this country has for the Constitution is simply weird. It's crazy. It's not what other countries do for their written documents. We act like this thing was etched in stone by the finger of God, when actually it was hotly contested and debated, scrawled out over a couple of weeks in the summer in Philadelphia in 1787, with a bunch of rich, white politicians making deals with each other, right? These politicians were white slavers, white colonizers and white abolitionists who were nonetheless willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. No person of color was allowed into the convention. Their thoughts were not included. No women were allowed to have a voice or a vote in the drafting of the Constitution. And quite frankly, not even poor white people were allowed to have a voice or a thought in what the Constitution was.

The thought that this document, made by one class of people, represents the best we can do in America is just ludicrous. Of course it's not very good. You only let one kind of person write it. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect of this, and how we go from "not good" to "trash," is that structurally there are a lot of stupid things in the document. There are a lot of things that you just wouldn't think we should do if you were starting again from first principles. Like the idea that we don't elect our own president; that's pretty dumb.

Pretty dumb.

You wouldn't do it that way, right? The way that voting rights have been couched as "We will not abridge the right to vote," as opposed to "You have a positive right to vote," that's dumb. The federal system has 50 different election systems instead of one federal system, that makes us have literally 3,000 police systems that's 3,000 sheriff's offices around the country, instead of one national police system. That's pretty stupid. If you just go structurally through the document, you see it's not exactly bad-idea genes, but you see quite a lot of bad ideas throughout the document.

The Judicial Crisis Network has been attacking you for your comments about this, tying it to the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. What are they saying? What did you say that they view as blasphemous in some way?

Again, here's another issue where there are two things going on. One, they have nothing on Ketanji Brown Jackson. There's nothing on her record that they can attack. They don't have a case. They don't have a law review note that she wrote. They don't have anything that she's actually done to attack her with, so they're trying to bank a shot against her off some of these other issues. And apparently, I'm one of the issues these idiot people think they can bank a shot off of, because these are the kinds of people who think that all Black people know each other like we all go to the same barbecue and we talk about our plans for whitey and then we go out into our separate corners.

That's not how it works. I've never met Ketanji Brown Jackson. I've literally never been in the same room with her in my life. I have no idea. She probably hasn't read the book because she's busy. She's about to be a Supreme Court justice, right? I would imagine there are parts of my book that she doesn't agree with, and that's fine too. So that's part of what's going on.

The other thing that's happened is that there are people who take the Constitution as gospel without really examining what the document is people who haven't actually read it, and even people who have read it but don't really understand what it's saying and what it's doing. So for instance, Dean and you'll find this funny there are people telling me the Constitution is not trash and is actually great because it's a living document that evolves with our times, which is an interesting thing for them to say because that's what I say. That's what liberals say the Constitution is.

It is the conservatives who say the Constitution is ossified in the original public meaning and intent of the slavers who wrote it. It is people like me who are like, "No, no, no, the document lives and breathes and evolves." So these idiot white people are literally trying to attack my position by restating my position, because they don't know any better, because they haven't actually read it or thought about it or understand it. And the big reason why I wrote the book is so more people could think about it, understand it. As we've talked about before on your show, I write in plain English so people can really get into what's happening and not be intimidated by the legal jargon. It's so you can understand why you'd want the constitution to live, breathe and evolve, for instance.

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Your book is written very accessibly. You don't have to be a lawyer, you don't have to know the Constitution, you don't have to be Black. I'm a lawyer and there are things I learned. For example, one thing I think is vitally important for Americans to know is the origin of the Second Amendment. Today they talk about the Second Amendment as something about defending your house, or when the black helicopters coming to chase you, that kind of stuff, or for deer hunting. Share a little bit about the true origins of our Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment was here to stop slave revolts. The "well-regulated militia," which is the first part of the Second Amendment, that was a thing was because in the South, the principal way of putting down revolting slaves was to bring out the well-regulated militia. It turns out it's kind of hard to hold Black people in bondage against their will, so occasionally you have to bring in the guys with the guns to do it. Well, in the original Constitution, without the amendments, it was unclear who had the authority to raise the militia. White Southerners thought that the Northerners would dominate the federal government, wouldn't raise the militia, and when Black people rose up for their freedom and rights, the South would be powerless to stop them militarily.

The Second Amendment is there to make it clear that everybody can be armed so they can raise this militia to go and fight slave revolts. That is not me theorizing or making things up. That is what George Mason, then governor of Virginia, said, when advocating for a Second Amendment. He literally made a speech where he said that, all right? People don't know that history, and part of the reason why people don't know that history is because Republicans have purposefully obscured it.

When you fast-forward 250 years, Antonin Scalia in D.C. v. Heller, invents a right to bear arms for personal self-defense that did not exist at the original founding of the constitution. Scalia quotes George Mason's speech, because at the beginning of the speech, a lot of it is about personal self-defense again, personal self-defense from the slave revolts. Scalia leaves that part out and talks only about this right to personal self-defense, taking out the context. That's how Republicans be!

This is something that goes through all the way through my book. Originalists have this PR campaign that they're going back to the original definitions of the Constitution as understood by the founders, when really they're just making stuff up that's convenient for their current political agenda.

You also talk about how the right to vote gets abridged all the time. Tell people what's in the actual, original Constitution. What did the framers have in mind about for could vote in the early days of this country?

The framers did not think that the right to vote, or even citizenship in the country, flowed down from the federal government. They thought it flowed up from the states. Your right to be a citizen was to be a citizen of Georgia or New York or New Jersey. Your right to vote, therefore, was determined by Georgia or New York or New Jersey or Virginia. There was no federal right to vote because all voting was done at the state level, in the conception of the framers. They weren't worried about minority voting rights because they didn't think minorities were going to vote at all.

They weren't worried about women voting rights because they didn't think women were going to vote at all. They were only concerned with making sure that the states had the power to decide for themselves who could and could not vote. So even when you go forward to things like the 15th Amendment, which says that you can't abridge voting on the context of race, color or creed; when you go to the 19th Amendment, which says that you can't abridge voting because of gender, which of course did not mean Black women at the time the 19th amendment was ratified.

All these amendments did, technically, was to say that the states could not restrict voting based on racial or gender grounds. And let's not forget that the states looked at the 15th Amendment and thought, "That's a very nice try," put it in a drawer and ignored it for 100 years. The states restricted voting on the basis of race all the time after the 15th Amendment because courts wouldn't enforce it. So the Constitution is silent on the right to vote because our election system is dumb. And it's based on, like I said, at this point 50 state electoral systems at the founding, 13 state electoral systems as opposed to one unified, rational, intelligent federal election system, which is what they have in all the other democracies, by the way. Let's not forget that we're the outlier here; other advanced Western democracies have a federal election system, not province by province.

You make a very compelling point that four of the 17 amendments ratified after the Bill of Rights have to do with voting. That was nearly 25 percent of the updates to the Constitution, because the framers didn't give it much thought. Later in life, the Constitution evolved and people were like, "Let's do something about it." What does that say to you?

One, it says that no matter what you try to do with your written document, it can't survive bad-faith conservatives. The reason we've had to have four different voting amendments, and probably are going to need a fifth one at some point in our future, is because at every point conservatives have tried to restrict the rights of everybody to vote. And to be clear, I'm saying "conservatives" because I don't care what conservatives call themselves in the morning. After the Civil War, conservatives called themselves Democrats. Now, they call themselves Republicans. In the future, they might call themselves Whigs. I don't care. Doesn't matter. The conservative party, however they define themselves, has opposed the idea of universal suffrage at every point, and that continues today.

The reason why you have to have so many updates is because every time you try to extend the vote, conservatives come up with some new, crazy reason to restrict the vote. One lreally small way of, I think, pointing this out is that the 26th Amendment says that basically everybody over 18 can vote. Simple, straightforward amendment: If you're over 18, you can vote. The thought being, if you can go to war, you can vote on whether or not we have a war. Makes sense, right?

So what happens if you turn 18 after the election in November, but before the end of the year? The election happens in your 18th year, but you don't actually turn 18. Let's say you have a Christmas birthday, essentially. Now, the constitutional amendment is silent about that. So conservatives step in and say, "Nope, you have to be 18 by the time the..." Why? They just made that up. That's just an arbitrary cut-off. Why wouldn't you make the arbitrary cut off the end of the year, as opposed to the end of the election? It makes no sense.

Do we really think that the difference in the intellectual quality of a 17-year-old in November changes radically when he hits his 18th birthday at Christmas? Who thinks that? Liberals are like, "We should just vote if you're..." So this is what I'm saying: Conservatives, at every point, even in really small ways, try to restrict the right to vote.

You have a chapter called "Reverse Racism Doesn't Exist," meaning of course racism against white people. But how do you square that with the Pew poll that found Republicans are likely to believe that white people face more discrimination than Black people and Hispanic people or Asian Americans do? You've got a whole group of Americans out there who think they're suffering discrimination and ask why our legal system doesn't protect white people, even though they are technically the majority.

They're technically the majority. That's exactly why. I explain protected-class status as understood by our constitutional interpretation. I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me. Constitutionally speaking, white people are not, and pretty much cannot be, a protected class, because the way that we define protected class, you have to be a minority or somebody singled out for a special historical kind of torment. So again, I'm a liberal: I think poor people should be a protected class. I think that. It is conservatives who won't let me do that. I think poor white people should be part of the impoverished protected class, but conservative white people won't let me do that.

Instead, they want to say all white people are a protected class, which just doesn't make sense based on our protected-class jurisprudence. So yes, from a legal definition, reverse racism doesn't exist. And I would say that also, from that legal basis, that extends through any kind of understanding of our social power structure.

Here's the problem when you tell white people that they've experienced privilege. There are white people who are the beneficiaries of white privilege who still have crappy lives. And they think that because I say that they have privilege, then that privilege means that they shouldn't have a crappy life. No, that's not what white privilege is. White privilege is that if you take a white person with a crappy starting position and a Black person with a crappy starting position and kind of play out the string, what we'll see is that the Black person will have the same crappy life as the white person, only a little worse. It's the whole thing of whenever white America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu.

It's the defensiveness of white Americans who are struggling who go, "Where's my privilege?" I understand. Maybe the term it's not literal in that way, but they take it literally. "Where's my privilege? Where are my happy days?" I get it. It's actually a minority burden, versus someone white who is just living a normal life, where you're not judged by the worst in your society and the worst in your community, and politicians don't demonize you for that and don't pass laws based on this mythical caricature that they've created about your community. The list goes on and on.

White people will look at me right now and be like, "Well, I'm not doing as well as that Black guy, so how am I having white privilege?" And it's like, because if I was white I would be the attorney goddamned general. That's how you know. That's the difference.

That brings us perfectly to the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. You had sitting senators, including Roger Wicker of Mississippi, call it a "quota hire," literally affirmative action. Ted Cruz called it offensive and said, "I guess if you're a white man or a white woman, you've got no shot at this." You're going to have one Black woman in the history of this nation and that's one too many for them, because they feel this is a zero-sum game.

There have been 115 Supreme Court justices in American history, and 108 of them have been white males. And Ted Cruz fixes his mouth to say, "I guess if you're a white man, you have no shot." It's an idiot statement, designed to play into the grievances of his idiot base, but also to be horribly offensive to everybody else because Ted Cruz doesn't care about being horribly offensive to everybody else. Again, all these attacks come because they have nothing that they can use against her. I have read her cases. They haven't maybe read her cases. She's been on the bench for nine years. That is more than four current Supreme Court justices had combined when they were elevated to the Supreme Court.

She has a deep legal record that these people could pick through and find something wrong. They picked through it, they haven't found anything wrong. Because they can't find anything wrong, they go to all these other racist smear campaigns because, frankly, racism always works for them. Show me, in the last 10 or 15 years, the white politician who got drummed out of office because they were too racist. I mean, Steve King in Iowa, maybe, after just doing some straight-up Nazi rhetoric, but that's about it, right? Ted Cruz knows that he's not going to lose a primary because he is too racist to the Black woman Supreme Court nominee, so he's just going to double down in that field. It's all he's got.

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You make a compelling case for reform. Having Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, if she's confirmed, that's not enough of a reform to make the Supreme Court what it should be. We can pass voting rights legislation right now, and this Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, might just strike it down after all the work. What do you think fundamentally has to be done to change that institution?

It's court expansion or bust. You expand the court or you cede the next 30 years of American law to six conservative justices. And as I try to explain throughout the book, nothing survives 30 years of six conservative justices. There's nothing. Anything you want, doesn't happen. John Roberts eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in 2013, as you mentioned, in Shelby County v. Holder. Roberts and Alito ganged up on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 2021 in Brnovich v. Arizona. What makes anybody think the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is going to be upheld by this Supreme Court? Has John Roberts gone somewhere? Is he on vacation? No, he's still right there, and he'll knock it down just like he's knocked down everything else.

As long as you have six conservative justices, you get nothing on voting rights, you get nothing on gun rights, you get nothing on climate change, you get nothing on police brutality, you get nothing on health care, you get nothing. So you expand the court and take your chances there, or you resign yourself to getting nothing. And people will say, "Oh, well, if we expand the court, Republicans will just expand it right back." So what? How is that worse than where we are now? I would argue that if we expand the court, it makes it harder for Republicans to expand it back because it makes it harder for Republicans to control all of government, because when everybody votes, Republicans lose.

So I say, let's go. I'm on record, I think, in the book for plus-20 judges. I think there are other reform ideas. A greatly expanded court does a lot of nonpartisan reforms. It leaves the Supreme Court as powerful as it is, but it makes each individual Supreme Court justice less powerful. That makes confirmation hearings less go-to-the-mattresses kind of situations. So there are lots of reasons why I get all the way to 20, but more, at this point, is the only way to stop the next 30 years of conservative takeover.

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Elie Mystal: Our Constitution is "actually trash" but the Supreme Court can be fixed - Salon

Nope, says the Tennessee Attorney General in a Mar. 14 opinion (No. 22-04) that was just posted on Westlaw:

The prohibition in Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 against carrying weapons in buildings in which judicial proceedings are in progress may be reasonably construed to apply only to those buildings in which a judge customarily conducts judicial proceedings, such as courthouses and criminal justice facilities. It does not appear that the General Assembly intended Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 to apply to buildings from which a judge conducts a judicial proceeding remotely by conference call or videoconference, such as the judge's private residence or another similar building {[or] to other buildings such as private residences, business offices or other similar buildings from which non-judicial participantse.g., attorneys or witnessesmight participate in judicial proceedings by conference call or videoconference.}

First, "[t]he obvious intent of [Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306] is to ensure the safety of judges, lawyers, court personnel, litigants, witnesses, and observers present in the courtroom and to assure the proper decorum and deportment during judicial proceedings." In other words, the intent is to protect people in courthousesi.e., in buildings where their participation in judicial proceedings requires them to come into contact with others who may pose a risk if they are armed. But a lawyer or judge or witness participating in a judicial proceeding remotely from his or her own home or office does not face the risks associated with physical presence in courthouses, so there is no reason to extend the meaning of "building" to include buildings from which people are participating remotely.

Second, the exemptions [to the statute] evince a legislative intent to include only such buildings as courthouses and criminal justice facilities in which judicial proceedings are traditionally and customarily conducted, because those exemptions apply to officials and other persons who would only be in courthousesnamely, law enforcement officers, bailiffs, marshals, and other court officers who have "responsibility for protecting persons or property or providing security."

Third, when Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 was enacted in 1989, the commercial internet had not been developed, and remote participation in judicial proceedings was by no means commonplace. Thus, it is unlikely that the legislature intended "buildings" to include buildings from which people participate remotely in judicial proceedings. Had that been the intent, the General Assembly could have and would have implemented that intent by amending the statute as technology developed to allow remote participation. To the contrary, while the statute has been amended several times since 1989, none of the amendments evidence an intent to include buildings from which persons are remotely participating in judicial proceedings by conference call or video conference.

Fourth, the constitutional-doubt canon would make a court disinclined to interpret the prohibition in Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 broadly to encompass private residences, since firearm possession there is protected by the Second Amendment. Construing Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 as applying only to those buildings in which a judge customarily conducts judicial proceedings, such as courthouses and criminal justice facilities, avoids constitutional conflict and safeguards Second Amendment rights. See D.C. v. Heller (2008) ("[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings .").

In sum, the prohibition in Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 against carrying weapons in buildings in which judicial proceedings are in progress may be reasonably construed to apply only to those buildings in which a judge customarily conducts judicial proceedings, such as courthouses and criminal justice facilities. It does not appear that the General Assembly intended Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1306 to apply to buildings from which a judge conducts a judicial proceeding remotely by conference call or videoconference, such as the judge's private residence or another similar building.

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Does Ban on Carrying Weapons "Inside Any Building in Which Judicial Proceedings Are in Progress" ... - Reason