Fair Is Fair
Nebraska and Oklahoma are suing Colorado for legalizing marijuana:
Colorado voters in 2012 passed Amendment 64, which allows the personal use of marijuana for recreation and creates a system of marijuana growing and marketing across the state, which is taxed and is supposedly regulated closely.
While this scheme is confined within the boundaries of the state, its two neighbors argued that Colorado-sourced marijuana is showing up increasingly in their states, in violation of their anti-drug laws.
Does this mean that California, with the strictest gun laws in the country, can sue Arizona and Utah, which have the most lax? I would think that guns from those two states have done infinitely more damage in California than pot could ever do in Nebraska and Oklahoma.
(pro-gun) conservatives would argue that there’s an explicit protection from Federal interference (via its interstate commerce powers) in gun regulation thanks to the 2nd Amendment.
While Roberts court decisions on gun rights have been absolutely horrid (e.g. finding a right to personal self defense somehow embedded in the 2nd) the odd thing is that my reading of the 2nd does allow people to buy, keep, and practice firing the exact types of assault weapons California bans.
We could fix this if we were a mature polity by superseding the 2nd with another amendment modernizing our constitution out of its 18th century frontier mindset.
We are not a mature polity tho. Really weird how we’re so polarized and thus paralyzed on everything it seems.
It doesn’t have to be this way! (?)
From 11 years ago in your comments section:
Evelyn
I support the President and the anti-gay marriage amendment and so does everyone else I know. We are the silent majority but we will be heard loud and clear come voting day.
http://blogd.com/wp/index.php/archives/388
Indeed they were, but something of a pyrrhic victory it seems, as they could not get enough coreligionist nutjobs (Scalia, Alito) to seal the deal in the judiciary, allowing the states and/or people being repressed to overturn this majoritarian theocratic power grab that the GOP perpetrated in 2004.
Yet, the GOP is still around now, running things even. Gah!
Happy New Year!
5 years to 2020!
I feel 2020 is like 2000 was for me in the 1990s, with that big countdown clock across from Shinjuku Nishiguchi exit.
One thing about
http://blogd.com/wp/index.php/archives/6982
that I haven’t seen commented on is that the GOP’s filibuster strategy of 2009-2010 was win-win for them.
There were two policy responses the Dems had: live with their majority stifled or eliminate the minority’s power to filibuster.
The GOP legislative program is one of destruction not creation, so having the Dems eliminate the filibuster would have been doing the GOP’s dirty work for them.
No doubt if they win the WH and keep Congress next cycle they’ll get rid of it anyway.
Now, I didn’t expect the GOP to crawl back into the majority so quickly after 2006, but here we are. The Dems still have the WH to veto, but that’s the last ditch, aside from the Dem filibuster of stuff coming out of the House.
Paralyzed government is also a win for the GOP of course, since people think everything happen’s on “Obama’s Watch” so it’s all his fault.
I’ll betcha, though, that if the Democrats filibuster even half as much as the GOP did, Republicans will not hesitate for a second to threaten to go nuclear on the filibuster. And even do it—and then re-institute it before they fall out of power again.
Probably won’t go that far, though—I doubt the Dems will filibuster that much.