GAZETTE COLUMN: THE ENDURING STRENGTH OF OUR CONSTITUTION by John P. Flannery

John & Holly Flannery at the Inauguration

The first inauguration of President Barack Obama was a celebration of a dream fulfilled and foreseen by the Reverend Martin Luther King.

My wife Holly and I wanted to be present in person at the second inauguration because we knew that, however much the first Inauguration marked how far we’d come, the second Inauguration would be about how far we hoped to go as a nation

We asked our Republican Representative in the U.S. Congress, Frank Wolf, if he had two tickets so that we could attend.  Dan Scandling, the Congressman’s Chief of Staff, immediately responded, by return e-mail, that he had tickets for us.  We thanked the Congressman and his staff.   No doubt many others thanked him as well for the opportunity to attend a Presidential Inauguration.  The President described why we gather to inaugurate a President.  It is because thereby “we bear witness to the enduring strength of our constitution” and “affirm the promise of our democracy.”

We traveled from Lovettsville to a Dulles parking lot to join others from as far away as Texas to ride downtown in a rented van.  We were there bundled up in the dark chilly morning air at 5 AM.  We didn’t know then there would be 800,000 people attending.  We only knew that DC had to be secure and difficult to navigate.

When we crossed the bridge from Virginia, we found Humvees blocking off ramps and roads, saw many rotating blue lights, and National Guard troops and police handling traffic and pedestrians and explaining how best and where to go.

The streets were almost empty in a yellowish glow of street lamps.  When we came upon a coffee shop at about 10^th Street near the mall, it seemed everyone was in there and no one was outside.  And it was warm.  We stood shoulder to shoulder with visitors from across the nation, from California to New York, from Washington to Florida, and uniformed officers from Maryland and DC, talking about when they arrived and their duty assignments.

The atmosphere was helpful and friendly like we were all going to a fine party.  Soon we found the crowds massing at the entry points to the mall and we walked further up toward Union Station as our space was on the West Side of the Capitol – where we would be able to see and hear the President.  There were pearls and mink, Sunday clothes, hawkers selling memorabilia. 

At 7AM the gates opened and, although we would stand or sit in the cold until 11:30 AM before the scheduled events were underway, the time flew by talking to people who traveled great distances or just walked across town.

When the President finally spoke and said “what makes us American … is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago,” there was a cheer that rolled from the Lincoln Memorial where the Reverend King once spoke to the West face of the Capitol where President Obama was now speaking.

He repeated how, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and he said that this day we “continue[d] a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.”  He said that, “history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”  With this, there was more applause.  As I looked around the eyes were on the President.  Tears flowed down the faces of men and women.  Small children asked to be lifted to see their president.

The President pledged that “together” we are resolved to “care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”  He asked the crowd and the nation watching to “do these things together, as one nation and one people.”  There was enthusiastic applause. 

He asked the crowd to remember “who left footprints along this great Mall” where we were assembled for the Inauguration, and who heard “a preacher say that we cannot walk alone,” and who came before “to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.”

When it was done and the crowd moved to the parade route or to eat or to busses or cars to leave, strangers spoke to each other about what they’d seen and heard, enthused for the nation, and its future.

Ringing in their ears were the President’s words that each of us has “the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient and enduring ideals.”

GAZETTE COLUMN: THE PRIVATE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS - NONSENSE by John P. Flannery

NRA's Wayne LaPierre

THE PRIVATE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS – NONSENSE

By John P. Flannery II

“The notion that registering gun purchases somehow violates the Constitution is unmitigated nonsense,” so said former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger.  He also said that “[n]othing outrages me more than the conduct of the National Rifle Association (‘NRA’).” 

Former NRA Vice President Neal Knox once said that the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were possibly “part of a conspiracy to enact gun control” and “could have been created for the purpose of disarming the people of the free world.”   This past week, the NRA has eclipsed its ordinary standard for bad taste by attacking the President’s children, asking why the federal government provides them Secret Service protection but not other children in our public schools.  Anyone want to suggest a distinction that the NRA might understand?

Our public discussion might improve, among the rest of us, exclusive of the NRA leadership, if we got some of the facts right -- like what the Second Amendment actually says and what it truly meant when it was written. 

When the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, our colonies were concerned about “standing armies” because the King had “kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.” 

When we had won our Independence and we had to concern ourselves with self-government under the Articles of Confederation, Revolutionary War Veterans led by Captain Dan Shays demanded cheap paper money, lighter taxes and the suspension of bank foreclosures of their farms.  They were going to close down the courts foreclosing on their property.  Massachusetts raised a militia to put down Shays’ rebellion and open the courts.

The Shays’ Rebellion became a part of the rationale for retired General George Washington and his aide, Alexander Hamilton, proposing a stronger federal government.  The resulting U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, clauses 15 and 16, said that the state militias going forward would respond to Congress’ call “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions,” and Congress would provide for “organizing, arming and disciplining the militia” reserving certain rights to the states.

The States, however, remained concerned about a “standing army.”  Colonel George Mason wished that the constitutional plan “had been prefaced with a Bill of Rights.”  He got his way and the so-called Military Amendments in the resulting Bill of Rights were the 2^nd and 3^rd Amendments, with the 3^rd Amendment prohibiting the quartering of troops and the 2^nd providing for “a well- regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”  

The States were thus empowered to do exactly what they had done at Lexington and Concord.  It was a collective right, not a personal right to bear arms, and for a certain well-defined purpose, stated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 

In United States v. Cruikshank, in 1875, a plaintiff charged citizens had been deprived of their constitutional right to bear arms, and the U.S. Supreme Court found that “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution,” and that this Second Amendment right “has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government.”

In 1934, in United States v. Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the National Firearms Act regulating the transfer of firearms and imposing a transfer tax, concluding that the weapons at issue lacked “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”

Actually, as a result of the National Defense Act of 1916, the “militia” has since been supplanted by the National Guard, and that same Act transformed the militia from an individual state service into a division of the United States Army, rendering the Second Amendment somewhat irrelevant as originally contemplated.

There was a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, that struck down DC’s strict gun-control law but most agree that decision was less than meets the eye.  500 or more challenges to gun laws since have been defeated.      

Former Justice Justice Paul Stevens, who dissented in the Heller decision, reportedly said that, even if you “generously” construe Heller, “the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations prohibiting the ownership or use of the sorts of automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado and Arizona in recent years.”

He also made a pointed observation about Congress: “The failure of congress to take any action to minimize the risk of similar tragedies in the future cannot be blamed on the court’s decision in Heller.”

Congress has failed to act.  The NRA may be fine with that.  But are you?

GAZETTE COLUMN: THE VULGARITY OF OUR PUBLIC DIALOGUE by John P. Flannery

A stoic Roman Senator once said, “It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity.” 

I don’t know that our national dialogue has “slipped” into vulgarity.  It has felt to me more like a down-hill flat out run into vulgarity. 

Let’s consider one example that covers the waterfront.

Back in March 2012, the Georgetown University President, John J. DeGioia, said that the foul language used to characterize student Sandra Fluke’s sincere objections to HHS regulations affecting contraceptives, especially what Rush Limbaugh had to say, was “misogynistic, vitriolic and a misrepresentation of [her] position.”

We teach our children to respect and not to bully others, but then we call a woman names, describe her in a hateful and demeaning manner, and purposefully misrepresent what she said.

If an opponent can characterize an individual as unappealing by how they look, or based on sex, nationality, race, religion, association, and any other personal aspect that is irrelevant to what he or she has said, they do it anyhow because it discredits the person – and they can slip the argument, perhaps never address it.

With networks, print, social media and emails, we have an epidemic of distortion, disinformation and material omission of what was truly said and of the contents of the source material purportedly quoted.

Currently, we have those insisting the second amendment was passed so that the people could overthrow their government with hand guns, rather than so that our fledging government could have a militia to protect it.  The Federalists were concerned about revolting revolutionary troops in Massachusetts when they so constituted this nation.  They were not inviting insurrection by an amendment to the constitution.

We don’t examine carefully the trite doggerel that passes for sense when repeated like a Hare Krishna chant, for instance, the phrase, “guns don’t kill …,” when plainly they do and when we have not heard of many drive-by knifings – nor any mass knifings. 

Whatever we think about who bears arms, the lawless wild west where every tobacco-chewing man or woman carries a gun to “settle up” is just not civilization – although some argue this is “civilization.” 

Some say this stuff out of ignorance, to con us, or to frighten us. 

On this last point, fear, we have heard of this baseless fear that “they’re going to take my guns” – even though we have struggled with this issue as a nation for decades – mourned other dead innocents - and still no one has taken anybody’s guns.  The Mayans shall likely be proven right before anyone’s guns are taken.  Given the invertebrate character of our elected representatives, there probably won’t even be reasonable protections put in place to save Johnny from the next assault rifle ambush in a school.

The best way to protect against the political con and the fear and anger mongers is to study – and not from the re-affirming slanted echo chambers that pass themselves off as news outlets these days.   

“Balanced coverage” has come to mean any sensible proposition can be offset by any stupid thing anyone says in opposition.  

It is little wonder we are slipping in science world-wide when some can insist without raucous laughter, such superstitious beliefs as the world is thousands of years old, when, spoiler alert, it’s billions of years old. 

We have those who say that we need not worry about extinction from “man” like that could never happen when, by man’s reckless clumsiness, greed and malicious intent he has so compromised species all over this planet since the mid-19^th century that many are now extinct. 

Nor are we doing so well by ourselves.  We put ourselves – humankind - and our progeny at risk of extinction as the planet’s weather slips away from our scientific understanding and control. 

As for our planet, we have those who would proliferate like rats and roaches while supporting, ironically enough, any great war that comes down the pike to prove that we are better, I suppose, so we may have territory, fossil fuels, power, influence and imperial bragging rights.

How do we dial back the vulgarity, our inability to communicate in a reasoned and constructive fashion -- so that we have a chance to address what really matters instead of, let’s choose another odious example, whether gay marriage is responsible for a 50 % divorce rate among heterosexual couples?

We must as a people resist invitations to demonize a person rather than consider the content of their argument. 

We must be aware of those who distort and omit material information. 

 

We must be sensitive to those who would inflame the public when using these techniques of slander, distortion and omission so they may prompt fear and anger in response. 

We must read and study more to protect us against a clumsier political class and a less reliable media, so that we know what we’re talking about when they don’t. 

We should choose our words more carefully than we’ve been doing. 

If we could do these things, that would be a little less vulgar, don’t you think?

GAZETTE COLUMN: VIRGINIA'S NEW SLAVERY by John P. Flannery

We have had Republican leaders across the nation talk about the jobs that they were going to create.  But they never explain that their object is to suppress wages, health and retirement benefits so their rich donors can realize greater profits for their members.  Among the leading suspects are the Chamber of Commerce, the National Right to Work Committee and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

One way they hope to do this is by compromising the right of workers to organize. 

Virginia hopes to continue this race to the bottom for our workers by extending what I call “the new slavery.”.

It’s the opening act in in the General Assembly Session convened this Wednesday in Richmond, Virginia.

They wrongly represent the initiative as the “right to work,” but every working man and woman who has tried to bargain with a company, knows what it really means is a “right to work for less.”

In 1908 the Supreme Court thought that it was just fine for an employer to require a worker not to join a union as a condition of his employment.  The War Labor Board from the First World War reversed field when it forbade employers from interfering this way.  In 1926, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act  that prohibited any interference with an employees’ right of self-organization.  In 1935, congress passed the Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act) that authorized the “union shop” meaning that, if a union had a contract with an employer, that an employee had to join that union. 

The “union shop” policy was against moochers, against free riders, like if someone were to hop a metro turnstile to get a free ride while others paid. 

Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes held that the Wagner Act was a statute that “safeguard[ed] the right of employees to self-organization and to select representatives of their own choosing for collective bargaining” without “restraint or coercion by their employer.” 

In 1947, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, over the veto of President Harry Truman, that said states could bar the “union shop” if they chose.  Virginia hurried to pass such a provision; now this Session of the General Assembly will consider making this abuse of workers, barring any “union shop,” a part of Virginia’s constitution.

The Reverend Martin Luther King said, “[W]e must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights”

We now have 24 states with “right to work for less” laws and, just as Reverend King said, the average worker in those states makes less, is more likely to be uninsured, the poverty rates are higher, also the infant mortality rates, and they spend less on educating their children, and have a higher rate of work place deaths.

We have seen American companies go off shore and abuse workers there and give them that competitive advantage, because they pay so little, work so long, in overcrowded conditions, with underage workers in dangerous work places.  Some lament how manufacturing has gone abroad but buy these products because they are cheaper, ignoring the abuses that make these products so competitive.

Before the Civil War, Whig Representative Richard Yates of Illinois was concerned about how slavery in the territories would hurt free laborers; Yates said in the Congress, “The free laborer does not wish the labor of slaves to come into competition with his labor.  The effect of slave labor is always to cheapen, degrade and exclude free labor.”

Our Virginia legislature may again “cheapen, degrade and exclude free labor.”

Nothing has changed to alter Rep. Yates’ common sense observation that workers, who are constrained by force of law as to how they may bargain to earn higher wages and benefits, prompt a cheapening and degradation of what other workers may expect to earn as well.

Many have seen the movie, Lincoln, about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing “slavery” and “involuntary servitude,” as if it was an historical artifact without application to this world but we have a “new slavery” in the Old Dominion and in America; it is the constraint upon the working man and woman -- and not just with regard to this attack on the right to have a union shop.

The Thirteenth Amendment applies to the conduct of both public and private parties.  In 1968, the Supreme Court said that even private discrimination under the Thirteenth Amendment may constitute prohibited “badges of slavery.”  Even by the first provision of the Thirteenth Amendment, this so-called right to work law causes “involuntary servitude” by those worker’s representatives who are required by federal law to fairly represent a worker while state legislation withholds the expense of that representation in its prohibition against union shops.    

The South has been brazen in its extension of the New Slavery for our workers, and would make this abuse of workers part of the Old Dominion’s Constitution.  We’d like to think they’re better than that.  But we’ve seen what they can do.