Ex-husband of Kimberly Guilfoyle and narcissistic mirror-hog Gavin Newsom *really* wants to be President someday. With his only virtues being that he's still a thousand times better than electing a Republican, and that he's on the correct side of social issues such as scrapping the death penalty, protecting abortion, and legalizing weed, Newsom spends more of his time clamoring for media attention than doing his job to fix the problems of his own state.
When one political party has complete and unwavering control of a state government, one of two things can usually happen: The first is the most ideal: The party in power no longer has to worry about picking political fights on petty issues to gain that 1-2% of the vote which will swing the next election in their favor. Working with the other party on the issues of the day no longer risks giving the other side a fantastic 30-second ad in the next election cycle. Instead, the party in power comes to the realization that the best way to keep their control is to competently and earnestly govern in a way that keeps every citizen content and satisfied with electing you back into your office each and every year.
But that's not what happened in California. Democrats in California did the OTHER thing that can happen with a one-party state: Rampant corruption. This is what happened to a lot of states in the deep South during the Jim Crow era, when Democrats typically got between 90% and 110% of the vote in every former confederate state. Texas, my home state, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Democrats were so entrenched into power within the state that politicians within the party would pick fights for each other for control. They spent less time actually governing the state, and instead using their allies in the business industry to obtain more power. Here's a example: In 1941, Morris Shepard, a senator from Texas, and the author of the 18th amendment, suddenly died at the age of 65. That opened up the seat for a special election between the waring tribes of the state Democratic Party, and a little-known congressman named Lyndon Johnson ran for the seat against the incumbent Texas Governor, Pappy O'Daniel. On election night, Johnson took a commanding lead, but his campaign manager, future Texas governor John Connally, made a fateful mistake. Connally told them to report the votes, which allowed O'Daniel's political allies among the south and east Texas party bosses to know the exact number of fraudulent votes needed for O'Daniel to catch up to Johnson. According to Connally, “The opposition then—Governor O’Daniel and his people—knew exactly how many votes they had to have to take the lead,” Connally said later. “They kept changing the results, and our lead got smaller and smaller and smaller. Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, we wound up on the short side of the stick and lost the election by 1,311 votes. I’m basically responsible for losing that 1941 campaign. We let them know exactly how many votes they had to have. In addition to O'Daniel's allies, state business interests aligned with former impeached and convicted Texas Governor "Pa" Ferguson had been concerned with O'Daniel's support of prohibition as Governor; they believed that he could do much less damage to their cause in Washington, D.C. than as Governor. The lieutenant governor, Coke Stevenson, was not in favor of prohibition, making his possible promotion to Governor a key selling point for the state's business interests in manipulating the election results. In the final vote tally, Johnson fell short by just 0.23% of the vote. LBJ wouldn't become a senator until 1948, when he had to resort to the same means that O'Daniel used against him to get elected.
(Note: Some of this paragraph is copy-pasted from Wikipedia - however, I actually wrote this part of the Wikipedia article.)
And if you thought the death of the Texas Democratic Party after the Civil Rights era would have brought an end to corruption in the great state of Texas, you would only be dreaming. Now that the Republican Party has become the new unbeatable and undefeatable governing party of the state, they too have turned to corruption and greed. There's a reason that Ken Paxton felt safe stealing from taxpayers like me for 8 years. He knew that as long as Greg Abbott won his race for the governorship in this red state, most of the voters don't even know or care who the attorney general is - they simply voted for Abbott, and then voted for the person with an "R" next to his name to be the Attorney General. Corruption and dishonesty as a given, because the voters accepted it with impunity. That's often what happens when a person knows they'll always win the next election.
Now, I don't believe Gavin Newsom spends half of his days as Governor using taxpayer money to protect his campaign donors from prosecution from charges of securities fraud - but the definition of corruption can mean more than just kickbacks and money laundering. It can also mean a corruption of people and purpose. Gavin Newsom, along with a lot of California Democrats, seem to have taken the fact that they simply can't lose an election, and have chosen to forsake their duty to make the state better. Newsom has been corrupted by the fact that the voters of his state (to be fair, when I briefly lived in California, I voted for him in the general election) were guaranteed to re-elect him and his Democratic majority in the legislature. Newsom no longer sees his purpose as working every day to improve the state's increasingly perilous homeless crisis, fixing the state's downright embarrassing inability to build a high speed rail line comparable to the Eurostar from London to Paris, or lowering the exorbitantly high cost-of-living brought upon partly by private equity's acquisition of millions of livable homes. Instead, he sees his purpose as catering to liberal Twitter's fantasies in order to build a brand of personality and run for President in 2028.
Republicans love to blame California's problems - and the people who move away to states like Texas from them - on California's high tax rates and laws that protect laborers. That's far from the real answer. When you have a state whose two largest metropolitan areas - the Bay Area and LA - live and thrive on Hollywood and Silicon Valley, its leaders will eventually become absorbed by those very two things: Theatrics and the Internet. Let me be clear: There are lots of fantastic Democrats in California like Katie Porter, Adam Schiff, and Jerry Brown - but many of California's state government leaders have failed to rise to the occasion not because they are Democrats, but because they are self-aggrandizing, and view the art of governing through the lens of a blockbuster film. We elect people to solve problems - not look the other way while they smile for a Facebook selfie. California's problems are not a result of liberal ideology, but a crisis of leadership.
Gavin Newsom appears to have gotten tired of not appearing on a national headline in the last month and a half, so yesterday, he released a video on (wait for it...) Twitter, proposing the "28th amendment" to the Constitution, which would raise the minimum age for buying a firearm to 21, mandate universal background checks, require a reasonable waiting period for gun purchases, and bar civilian purchase of assault rifles.
Oh, boy. I got about 99 grievances with this garbage, but here's a few of them:
The whole idea behind ratifying an amendment - especially one for the federal constitution, which, excepting our 202-years-too-late ratification of James Madison's Congressional Compensation Act, has not been amended in fifty-two years - is that you are fixing something "wrong" with the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights was passed to "fix" the fact that the Constitution offered no explicit protections from government overreach into personal liberty. The 12th amendment was passed to "fix" the fact that our original system of electing presidents had broken down into chaos and disorder after just the fourth attempt (if only more people were reminded of this fact). The 13th amendment was passed to "fix" the fact that the Constitution allowed white people to own black people. The 17th amendment was passed to "fix" the fact that the Constitution didn't give the federal government the power to tax incomes. The 19th amendment was passed to "fix" the fact that the Constitution didn't give women the right to vote. The 21st amendment was passed to "fix" the fact that we outlawed alcohol, and thus brought chaos upon ourselves. The 25th amendment was passed to "fix" the fact that our original constitution didn't give us any guidance for what to do if our President suddenly couldn't do the job, and for 124 years, our country was operating on a contrived precedent set by "His Accidency" John Tyler, who, to put it bluntly, usurped the Presidency for himself.
So what does Gavin Newsom's "28th amendment" fix?
If your answer is the 2nd amendment, you've already lost the argument. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the 2nd amendment itself; its only flaw is that it has holes - holes that have been widened over the course of time by a world of technology and innovation that does not look remotely the same. And those holes have been filled by the most American of institutions: Greedy business interests. Gun manufacturers have used the second amendment to create a wholly contrived "gun culture" in America based around the mythology that our founding fathers gave them the right to own semi-automatic assault weapons designed to kill enemy soldiers in the rainforests of Vietnam. Never mind that the second amendment was drafted in a time when the most common firearm used by the citizenry was either the musket, which was only tolerably accurate from 100 yards and took 20-30 seconds to load and fire a single round, or the long rifle, which was more accurate than the musket, but took upwards of two minutes to reload. One did not have to fear single-man terrorism by firearm in the local school, because the shooter would either miss the target, or spend enough time reloading that he could be dead from hanging by the time he could fire another round.
Conservatives' belief that our ancestors who governed in the early days of the United States desired nothing but unregulated and uncontrolled access to firearms becomes even more unfounded when we examine history to find that Congress nearly passed a constitutional amendment that would ban dueling. This came after members of Congress had been involved in high-profile cases of dueling, and it resulted in members being killed. The amendment didn't pass, but in 1839, Congress passed a law banning dueling in the District of Columbia. So much for "the right to bear arms...shall not infringed." Here's an even better example from the state Constitution, of all places, Texas (ah yes: woke, anti-gun Texas):
Article I, Section 23:
Sec. 23. RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS. Every citizen shall have the right to keep and bear arms in the lawful defence [sic] 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.
The historical evidence is clear: The second amendment was never intended to give conservative wack-jobs the right to own a machine gun and take it to the Capitol on January 6th, but for self-defense and "defense... of the State."
If Democrats actually controlled the 38 state legislatures required for such a change to the second amendment (which they don't, and its not even close) to clarify for all future generations that the second amendment gives the federal government a reasonable amount of power to regulate firearms as it sees fit - that would be a great idea. But passing Newsom's 28th amendment would directly imply that his four core proposals - 1. raising the minimum age for buying a firearm to 21; 2. mandating universal background checks; 3. requiring a reasonable waiting period for gun purchases; and 4. barring civilian purchase of assault rifles - are not allowed under the second amendment. But they ARE. In fact, Congress already passed an assault weapons ban in the 1990s, and it survived for its 10-year lifespan without being struck down by the court.
Gavin Newsom's amendment is written like a piece of legislation, not an amendment designed to last for generations. If you told someone from the 1780s what a "universal background check" was, they would have no idea what you were talking about. The same would apply in the other direction - If a congressman from the 1780s challenged a member of Congress from today's world to a duel, it would be a completely unacceptable proposition in the 21st century. The idea behind an amendment to the Constitution is that it can be used to shape government policy not just in the short term, but for situations never imaginable at the time. When women in the 1920s first earned the right to vote, their top-issue of mind was not about abortion - it was about asserting their right to suffrage to fix their staggering lower amount of pay and horrible workforce conditions compared to men. But the fact that women can vote today in America is the reason abortion is legal in a majority of states in the country, and the reason that Republicans now quake in fear at the mere mention of Roe v. Wade. The fight for women to vote was not about just solving the issue-of-the-day, but giving women the power to have a voice for their concerns in every issue affecting their lives generations down the road.
One of Martin Luther King's famous sayings about the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was that the Civil Rights Act may have been the greatest accomplishment for the rights of black people in America since the Reconstruction Amendments, but it would mean nothing if black people never got the right to vote. If they didn't keep and maintain that right, white people would continue to govern the country without having to answer to the concerns of minority communities, and would never address their concerns. Gavin Newsom's amendment echoes this same problem. Firearms and weapons will continue to change over time as technology evolves. Passing such an amendment (if it were even remotely possible in this period of time) would be a great accomplishment, but it would mean nothing if Congress didn't have the power to regulate guns to keep us safe. Forgive my Star Trek joke, but what good will it be in the 23rd century to have an amendment that imposes limits on the size of a magazine when we start using phasers and disrupters as firearms? Will the assault weapon ban apply to phaser rifles? Will it make it illegal to use do-it-yourself photon torpedos? Will phasers even be legally considered a "firearm?" "Whelp, the 28th amendment didn't ban that one! Wish that hair spray enthusiast lunatic from California had thought of it back on Stardate 101031.5."
The better strategy, other than President Biden to give Gavin Newsom an ambassadorship to China, Japan, or South Korea in 2027 as soon as that man is no longer Governor of California, so that Newsom can shut his mouth and never run for President, is to create an amendment that clarifies to everyone that Congress actually does have the power to regulate firearms. Here's an example:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms for defense of themselves or the state shall not be infringed; a well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.
Congress and the states shall have the power to reasonably regulate -
-the types of arms that can be produced and which are allowed for the general populous;
-the times, places, and manner in which those arms may be wielded;
-who may have such arms, as to prevent unqualified gun handlers, the insane, and dangerous criminals from acquiring such arms;
-all other policies relating to firearms that are deemed necessary and proper to regulate for public safety and the prevention of crime without undue contraction of rights.
Here's what my version does: It gives people the right to keep and bear arms for a specific reason: To protect themselves and to protect our country. It also gives Congress and the states a limited power to regulate those firearms for a specific set of reasons, such as "types of arms" so that Congress could ban assault rifles. "Times, places, and manner" gives Congress the ability to prevent open carry in places like schools. "Who may have such arms" gives Congress the power to implement laws like universal background checks and red-flag laws. And finally, the last section, the "necessary and proper" clause, wraps the amendment around for use in the future. We don't know what firearms will look like in 100 years, just as James Madison wrote the Necessary and Proper clause in Article I to give Congress the power to pass laws in the future for unforeseen issues and problems of his time, so that we could have a functioning government in our time.
Gavin, grow up. You have 4 years to run for President, and in the mean time, instead of hogging the camera for views on Twitter for your fantasy amendments to the Constitution, try amending real life issues in your own state. The homeless man in Oakland who became addicted to morphine back in the 2000s from opioids provided to him by the liars in the pharmaceutical industry, and is now on the streets because he got hooked on street fentanyl, living day-to-day not knowing whether he'll wake up tomorrow, doesn't care about your stupid Twitter video about a dead-on-arrival constitutional amendment that would have a useful lifespan of 20 years. You were elected to help people like him, not to waste time pandering for keyboard warriors on the Internet. Do your job.
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