Regarding Jeff Sessions

My letter to Senator Rob Portman- R. OH

Senator,

I’m deeply concerned about the conduct in your chamber. I don’t care for Judge Sessions, but I expect that he will be confirmed. That being said, the tactic employed by your colleagues to silence Senator Warren is unacceptable.

This process is intended to verify the character as well as the judiciary experience and credentials of a man who will spend the term defending the law of this land.

If we are to consider giving this man the power of membership in the highest department of legal defense authority in the land, whether a letter is condemning or praising cannot be considered as grounds to dismiss it.

It’s at once immaterial and highly pertinent that this letter was written thirty years ago.

On the one hand, you are, again, considering an appointment of great power. If this man is to wield this power for possibly this entire presidency, then how he has wielded his power in the earlier part of his life must be considered. It doesn’t matter if he persecuted the black community 5 years or 30 years or 50 years ago, it doesn’t matter if he was saying racially charged remarks in jest or in a court of law. He’s being considered for a mighty appointment and the conduct of his entire lifetime should be open to scrutiny.

On the other hand, it is incredibly important that Mrs. King wrote this 30 years ago. You and your colleagues by silencing Senator Warren have at once opened a discussion about the rights of women in the Senate compared with their male colleagues, but at the same time she has thrown into stark relief what it really is we are thinking about here.

Thirty years ago Mrs. King wrote these words and they evidently fell on deaf ears. You and your colleagues are determining in these deliberations what progress has been made in that time.

If you choose once again to turn a blind eye to these complaints, to indeed even forbid the suggestion that he behaved improperly, then you are not only failing to properly vet this man in the interests of the American people but you are also declaring that we have made no progress in these thirty years- that white people as a whole are still as rotten as ever, that if a white man obstructs the right of black people to vote it will go uninvestigated.

In the 80s he could still be nominated to a federal circuit with no serious questions asked about these matters. Is that still true today?

I’m not telling you that you must reject this man, but I am telling you that you have no choice but to examine these allegations with the seriousness they call for. It is absolutely unacceptable to once again sweep these charges under the rug. This conversation needs to be had, and it is your duty to have it. Indeed, even if you think that these matters were sufficiently addressed in 1986, it is time to re-examine them and see if he would pass muster under modern standards, to see if we really have become a better people.

Adam Locke

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sessions supremecourt nominee king kingletter warren portman

megrimlocke

7 years ago

How The Second Amendment Fails Us Regarding Tyranny

The argument that the second amendment is necessary to resist a tyrannical government is without practical merit, and I intend to demonstrate this by utility rather than arguing that the government is not out to get you or that it is morally wrong to kill people. As such, this essay takes a somewhat dispassionate and analytic attitude towards murder.

Indeed, there are several cases we can document in which the government and its citizens have been at violent odds both locally and at a federal level. The second amendment has not only failed to allow the citizens to overthrow the will of the government in these cases, it has in fact gotten them killed. I will not therefore argue that violence is not the answer because I would like to have everyone join in a peace circle and sing Welcome Christmas, but rather I will argue that it is not the answer because it doesn’t work. Then I will demonstrate the ways in which the second amendment enables and amplifies the curtailing of liberties for the American people.

The Waco Siege began with an initial FBI raid in which 4 agents and 6 Branch Davidians were killed. Following this was a 51 day siege that ended with the Branch Davidian building burning down, killing 76 people inside. Of the surviving Branch Davidians, of which there were eleven, all were arrested upon fleeing the flames.

The astonishing loss of life aside, the survivors still didn’t get their way. For all their guns and the four FBI agents they killed, they either went to prison anyway or else died a horrifying death by fire. The people stood up to the government for the sake of their (deviant) religious beliefs and they were prepared with violent means and they died or went to prison. The second amendment failed to allow these people seeking religious freedom to resist the government.

More recently, the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge also failed. In this case an armed militia seeking to assert land ownership rights over the government took possession by force of a national parks facility and engaged in a standoff with federal officers for a total of 40 days. At the end of this time, seven of them, including Ammon and Ryan Bundy who led the expedition, were tried and acquitted of federal charges. Most of the people they led into this crusade to enrich themselves did not fare so well. Six were sentenced to 1-2 years of probation, some of those on house arrest. Two were given 366 days in prison, with one of them given a further three years probation, another two were given 21 and 18 months in prison respectively. One man got off with no sentencing and indeed no trial, for the perfectly sensible reason that he had already been shot to death.

Once again, a group of armed people in a relatively remote facility against the federal government purchased less than two months of resistance with their guns and paid toll in blood and prison time.

And that’s just how it goes down if you’re white and dealing with the feds.

In 2016, we all watched a video with a good deal of tyranny in it. Philando Castile was shot to death by a Minnesota officer who requested of him information about what arms he was carrying and asked him to present documentation for the weapon. Mere possession of the firearm got Castile killed by the government, but the bloodletting did not end there.

Outraged as many of us were Mr. Micah Xavier Johnson decided to do something about his tyrannical government using his army training and some firearms. To his credit (if one can credit a murderer), this is the case from my review in which the number of government agents killed exceeds the number of non-government citizens killed, perhaps owing to his training or perhaps the MOUT environment in which he fought.

Mr. Johnson succeeded in killing a total of 5 police officers and injuring a further nine officers. Of all the anti-government combatants in my review, his is the only case in which there was not a person who believed that they were receiving instructions from God and also the only case in which claiming resources for himself in the form of child wives or land was not the goal. To incite open armed rebellion against the government and overthrow it by force of arms and invert a longstanding system of racism, enabled by the second amendment, was his goal.

Mr. Johnson’s otherwise fairly successful attempt to injure if not destroy the government was brought to a historical end. The local police force in Dallas killed Mr. Johnson by taping an explosive to a bomb removal robot and having the automaton hand-deliver the weapon to Mr. Johnson. He is the first US citizen to be killed by police by robot. It seems that anti-personnel assault rifles and MOUT tactics are not effective against a government killbot.

Bear in mind by the way that this was a local police force. Had the same mentality been at play among federal agents a UAV missile strike would seem the scaled up analog.

What can we take from these case studies? By taking up arms against the government you at a minimum ensure that you will be involved in a protracted legal battle, the chances of escaping that legal battle with your liberties intact are slim, and there is a very good chance that you will simply end up dead.

You cannot use the second amendment to beat the government and secure your liberties, no one ever has. If you would argue that these case studies are not the same as the wave of citizen uprisings you think you could incite, let me remind you that the Bundys and Mr. Johnson intended to lead such uprisings themselves and failed to get them off the ground, and that further the only occasion of armed uprising on the scale you propose ended with the federal government on top on April 9th 1865 at Appomattox.

This isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of record.

Yet, there are more ways in which the second amendment inhibits our liberties. As already mentioned, Philando Castile was killed because he possessed a firearm, but you don’t even need to possess one for the police to kill you.

Tamir Rice, 12, of Cleveland Ohio possessed a water pistol or the like and was shot by police twice, dying the following day. The police officers suffered no penalty becuase the grand jury did not indict them because the video shown to them showed Tamir drawing his water pistol, which the officers involved believed to be real.

Because of the second amendment, there is a reasonable possibility that police officers will face armed assailants anytime and everywhere, and as such, the courts regularly give them the benefit of the doubt because officers are not necessarily wrong to fear for their lives when facing down a 12 year old boy.

The second amendment and the companies that benefit from it have flooded our country with firearms, and as such police can shoot people with impunity because of their reasonable concern of being shot themselves. Who they are shooting largely comes down to a discussion of racism, but don’t imagine that fair skin will save you, as discovered by Australian Justine Damond. It was in fact she that summoned the police to begin with, and she is now dead. That her police killer was arrested is perhaps a matter of her being white, but there is also the possibility that it had to be done to attend to what was an international incident. Australian citizens get more justice than American ones do in the matter of police shootings in our own country, it seems.

When a policeman can gun down a 12 year old boy and suffer no jail time, we are living in tyranny. When a man can reach for his papers in his car and be gunned down we are living in a police state, and when we declare that the legal device by which these things are possible is critical to preserving our freedoms, we are wrong.

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megrimlocke

6 years ago