90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Girls With Guns

CBS News deceptively cropped body camera footage that showed a 13-year-old boy holding a gun before he was fatally shot by Chicago police in March.

A law enforcement officer fatally shot Adam Toledo during an encounter in response to gunshots heard on a police scanner. Police said Toledo ignored “verbal directions, fled, used significant force, and was armed with a semiautomatic pistol,” which is why the officer fired.

Body cam footage released this week appears to show Toledo holding a weapon moments before he was shot, but CBS News posted a clip to its website and Twitter page that cropped out the footage showing the teen’s alleged firearm.

The CBS News article accompanying the cropped video did not directly acknowledge that Toledo was armed. Instead, the corporate media organization aired opposing claims from Eric Stillman, the law enforcement officer, who said he shot Toledo because he was “faced with a life-threatening and deadly force situation,” and Toledo’s family attorney, who claimed the gun was not in the teen’s hands when Stillman fired off a shot. CBS News did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

While a semiautomatic pistol was recovered at the scene, multiple politicians such as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed there was “no evidence” the teen fired the weapon before...

The constitutional power of the states wheezes along, alive in name only, a century after the 17th Amendment. H.R. 1, to a large degree, is just a means to euthanize a terminally ill patient.

Ihave never been in real quicksand, and you probably haven’t been, either. But many of us have the sense that our constitutional republic is sinking into a kind of political quagmire—what James Madison in Federalist 48 memorably called an “impetuous vortex.”

When one part of the framer’s constitutional arrangement tried to exert “an overruling influence over the others,” Madison warned, no “parchment barriers” would be sufficient to keep it under control. Instead, the founders’ specific intention was for other parts of the system—including the people themselves—to assert their powers and prerogatives and restore a proper balance.

Those reflections provide some context for understanding the Democrats’ audacious and nakedly partisan attempt at manipulating our electoral process—otherwise known as H.R.1, the “For the People Act.” This proposed legislation would secure the rights and freedoms of “the people” in much the same way the aliens in a classic “Twilight Zone” episode arrived on earth “to serve man.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton rightly notes the bill would “federalize state elections.” He observes that the founders, “intentionally excluded Congress and gave state legislatures the authority to run state elections . . . . The Act opens elections in every state to widespread fraud, mixed messaging, Constitutional violations, and shuttering of speech.”

I regret to inform Paxton—along with governors and other officials in many red states who object to the bill—that, in key respects, this fight was already lost more than 100 years ago, with the passage of the 17th Amendment. That amendment provided for the direct election of senators by popular vote, replacing the founders’ plan for having state legislatures choose members of the U.S. Senate.
The Purposes of Federalism

The system prior to the direct election of senators certainly had its problems. Deadlocked state legislatures sometimes were unable to choose any candidate, leaving Senate seats vacant for months and even years at a time. And with a much smaller pool of electors to influence, corruption was hardly unknown. At the peak of the Gilded Age, with its unchecked industrial monopolies, one pundit wrote that “Standard Oil did everything to the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it.”

Nevertheless, far more was lost than was gained by cutting the state governments out of the process altogether. It is not too much to say that direct election of senators—ratified in 1913—mortally wounded federalism. A century later, the constitutional power of the states wheezes along, alive in name only. H.R. 1, to a large degree, is just a pillow over the face of a terminally ill patient.

The framers saw a “double advantage” in their scheme: favoring senators with judgment and experience (rather than mere popularity), while also giving the states some “agency in the formation of the federal government” that would strengthen their constitutional powers and authorities and “form a convenient link between...

Over the last few weeks, the issue of corporations going fully woke and shoving their viewpoints down the throats of their customers has become pervasive. One of the first to enter the fray was Coca-Cola, who decided to offer its employees critical race theory training, including demanding they “be less white.”

After that, things just snowballed, with Georgia’s mundane election reform bill becoming a punching bag for Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and dozens of other corporations looking to make political statements. Later, 100 companies, including Coca-Cola, got together on a conference call to push the matter even further, mocking Sen. Mitch McConnell’s warning to stop bending the knee to the left.

As I wrote at the time, it was yet another sign that it was time for Republicans to stop fluffing these mega-corporations that turn around and spit in the face of normal Americans.

Now, Coca-Cola is trying to make nice, though, I doubt their motives for doing so are anything but profit-driven.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a no from me, dawg.

You don’t get to strip naked and jump into the freezing waters of wokeness and then expect Republicans to pull you out and give you a pat on the head by going back to buying your products. No one made Coca-Cola (or these other companies) lie about the Georgia election reform bill, and no one made them alienate a large portion of their American consumer base by becoming overtly political. But they did those things anyway, and they should be left to pay the consequences.

Further, you can bet the “path forward” they are promoting there is one that decidedly swings to the left. Conservatives aren’t interested in compromise anymore because it’s never enough. Lessons have been learned.

I feel like I’m going to be saying this a lot over the next several years, but Republicans are done being stomped on. If these big corporations want to go woke because they fear the...