After the Republican House majority declined to schedule a vote on gun control legislation last week, Democrats sprang into action. Well, the minority staged a “sit-in,” so technically we should probably say “shrank into inaction.” Either way, it was a cheap political stunt. And we fear that, given the favorable media attention it received, we can expect more petulant behavior in the halls of Congress.
The issue here, as explained in these pages last week (“Obama’s Go-to Diversion”), is that Democrats want a blanket ban to prevent anyone on the terror watch list from purchasing a gun. The watch list, however, is kept secret by the government, and many, maybe most, of the people on it have committed no crime. Indeed, many are on it erroneously. Using a secret government list to restrict Second Amendment rights with no due process is such a terrible idea even the ACLU is forcefully opposed to it.
By ignoring due process concerns, more than a few observers have noted, Democrats effectively staged an anti-civil-rights protest. The observation is all the more pungent as the sit-in was led by Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. Lewis is a genuine hero of the civil rights movement, and his courage 50 years ago is worth celebrating. However, we are sad to report that in recent years he has diminished his reputation by engaging in petty and nakedly partisan grandstanding.
Let’s count the civil rights Lewis and his cohorts were making a mockery of. There’s the Second Amendment, of course, which has a long history of being intertwined with the civil rights movement. A helpful reminder is about to hit theaters—the new film The Free State of Jones is based on the true story of Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter who led an uprising that included escaped slaves and eventually liberated several Mississippi counties in the middle of the Civil War. As you might imagine, such an insurrection involved guns. A little more recently, Martin Luther King Jr., under constant threat from the Klan, applied for a concealed weapons permit in 1956. He was denied.
The Fifth Amendment concerns are obvious enough. It wasn’t that long ago liberals were shrieking that the Bush administration’s secret terror lists were unconstitutional and un-American. Now they want to use them to enable even broader restrictions of rights? Lewis himself was once erroneously put on the terror watch list and, as a result, was singled out for extra security checks at airports “35 to 40 times” over the course of a year, according to a statement from his office in 2004.
The charitable way of viewing what happened is that Democrats are so desperate to prevent another tragedy like Orlando, they simply are not thinking through the consequences of what they are doing. Unfortunately, this is also part of a long pattern of Democrats’ viewing the Constitution as just an impediment to imposing their political will.
