Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Congress has passed a law
shielding the gun industry from lawsuits arising from crimes committed by people using their products.
"It's a historic piece of legislation," Wayne LaPierre, the association's chief executive, told the New York Times. LaPierre added that the bill was the most significant victory for the gun lobby since Congress rewrote the federal gun control law in 1986. "As of Oct. 20, the Second Amendment is probably in the best shape in this country that it's been in decades."
Without addressing the merits of this law, let me just point out that it runs contrary to the most fundamental tenet of the Republican Party: federalism. Congress has passed a law overriding the laws of every state in the entire country on a subject about which there is widespread disagreement and no clear moral impetus (as with, say, civil rights law).
And, though Republicans have long decried the power of the Supreme Court to decide the law of the land, they are now trying to stack the court with judges who will support the constitutionality of the big-government laws they are passing.
Emerson said that consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds. (Emerson was more full of shit, in my opinion, than a port-a-potty at Woodstock, particularly in this blatantly self-rationalizing quote, but there you are.)
If so, then Tom DeLay is a great man. But I like to think that a little ideological consistency is actually a good thing in the long run, and that serious conservatives ought to be worried about such heavy-handed measures. If they really believe that the smaller the government the better, how do they justify such measures, other than with an "ends justifies the means" argument?
