A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

So much for states’ rights

In the grand tradition of Congress treating D.C. as its own personal political laboratory, Nevada’s Republican senator John Ensign has attached an amendment to the D.C. voting rights bill that would essentially gut what remains of the District’s gun control laws post-Heller.

I actually have fairly middle-of-the-road, or even conservative views on gun rights. Part of that comes from growing up in a small town/rural area where virtually every adult male (and not a few of the women) I knew owned multiple firearms. So, I don’t have the aversion to guns per se that a lot of my liberal friends do.

But – D.C. is a dense urban area with a high crime rate, and it strikes me as utterly reasonable that the District would want to regulate guns, even if Heller makes an outright ban untenable. Approaches to gun control ought properly be tailored to local needs and conditions; that’s one benefit of federalism. Stunts like these are nothing more than playing to the folks back home, while depriving D.C. residents of meaningful self-government.

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4 responses to “So much for states’ rights”

  1. Rick Ritchie

    I am for federalism here. So I don’t like the Supreme Court getting into the mess. I do believe in a right to bear arms. My understanding of the Constitution is that the Second Amendment recognizes the right to bear arms, and that it binds the Federal Government from infringing upon that right.

    I think that the original architecture of the Constitution did see states as separate entities, however. So the Supreme Court would not have had jurisdiction over many questions, even where the questions were of rights.

    Since the Civil War, through the Fourteenth Amendment, many of our Constitutional Rights have been municipalized. They are considered binding on lower levels of government and enforceable by the Supreme Court. This allowed the higher level to prevent some intrusions at the lower levels. But it also threatened the sovereignty of the lower levels. I think this was a bad idea, even if it has some nice consequences.

    This leaves me in the unusual position that I think that all gun laws are wrong and violate rights. The Second Amendment recognizes that right even if it does not in all cases create a mechanism for dealing with violations of that right. So I don’t think the Supreme Court should have the authority to do anything about such violations, except at the Federal level. It’s the same position I would take if the Queen of England wished to prevent a city from taking free speech away from some minority. The assault on free speech would be terrible. But it is not the place of the Queen of England to interfere in the affairs of an American city. Though if she wishes to voice her opinion, I’m all for it.

    Even if I’m wrong, I think people need to take into consideration the change in understanding of the Constitutional architecture that was brought on by the Civil War. We cannot read this as if we’re functioning under the same theoretical framework as the Founders.

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  2. Jack Perry

    I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that, according to the constitution, (a) D.C. isn’t a state, so “States’ Rights” is rather meaningless when it comes to D.C., and even more so, (b) Congress is particularly charged with running D.C. (Article I, Section 8).

    So your title is misleading, and your first sentence is wrong. I don’t much disagree with what follows, but it’s rather discouraging to see that forty years ago people still understood this, and hence amended the Constitution to give the District a presidential vote—and today people seem not merely to ignore it, but to be ignorant of it.

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  3. Lee

    Well, the title is obviously not literally true, but surely depriving people of meaningful self-government is antithetical to the “spirit” of states’ rights. Not to mention that the District is treated as a state for many purposes, most notably taxation. And my first sentence refers to the long history of congressmen who don’t represent DC residents in any meaningful way imposing their pet policies on the District. (The imposition of school vouchers by Republicans and the current threat of Democrats to take it away is another example.)

    The constitutional question is obviously a thornier one. Other things being equal, a constitutional amendment process would be preferable. (Though why not then go whole hog and make the District a state?)

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  4. Jack Perry

    For a long time, I’ve been in favor of returning the territory to Maryland, as Congress did with Arlington County back when they thought they’d never need that land. (That turned out well… now half of Arlington, it seems, is federal government property.)

    This way District residents obtain voting rights. Maryland almost certainly obtains one or two representatives in Congress, and the Senate isn’t disturbed.

    I’m not especially in favor of making the capitol city a state that would inherently receive special privileges as compared to the other states. Northern Virginia and Maryland are bad enough.

    Although if we’re going the way of a state proper, I’d favor a constitutional amendment myself.

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