Judges Will Not Work 100 Hours A Week

"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos," remarked Jim Hightower, who on his website bills himself, not extravagantly, as "America's #1 populist."

That applies to the USA's ongoing issue of illegal immigration, which ought to be settled- but won't- with either widespread deportation or a rapid process toward citizenship.  However, it does not apply to a crisis, one in which well over 50,000 children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have crossed the border only since October 1.

Thanks to a Bush-era law, these youngsters cannot be driven back into Mexico or dropped by parachute into Tijuana, but rather must be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to shelters or accommodating families while awaiting deportation hearings.  This is not an ongoing issue, but a crisis, and one in which quick- and inevitably costly- action must be taken.

And so it was disappointing to hear this exchange between Chris Hayes and U.S. Representative Beta O'Rourke (D-Texas) on Tuesday's "All In":

HAYES: Let me ask you to weigh in on your colleagues from Texas, Senator John Cornyn, Henry Cuellar, another border representative, a Democrat.

They have introduced legislation that wouldn`t completely get rid of the process for these kids, but would give them essentially expedited review. There would be judges that would render a decision I think within a week and basically be able to make a aye or nay decision. And if it`s nay, they get sent back.

Do you support that legislation?

O`ROURKE: I have a 7-year-old son, Ulysses. I can only imagine him having to appear before an administrator or immigration judge within a 72- hour period and determine whether he`s going to take an asylum or non- asylum track to petition for residency within this country when he`s fleeing violence, has maybe had his friends, his brothers, his sisters killed; he may, himself, have been threatened.

He`s just passed through a three-week grueling process to move up through the interior of Mexico to present himself for asylum at the U.S.- Mexico border. Absolutely not. The wrong way to go -- I know both men, Henry Cuellar, John Cornyn, good people with good hearts. I just think this is not the best thought-out proposals and would have some terrible unintended consequences for these kids who are fleeing violence right now.

Remember, these are kids, these are 7-year olds, these are 11-year olds, these are people who are leaving a situation that is intolerable by any measure. And by way of comparison, Nicaragua, which is the second poorest country in this hemisphere after Haiti has sent almost no children.

We`ve seen 2,000 family members in El Paso, not one single one of them has come from Nicaragua. This is a unique situation to Honduras, to Guatemala, to El Salvador. I think we need to respond accordingly.

You might have expected in this lengthy reply, or somewhere else in the interview, a suggestion from a progressive on how to deal with what some conservatives have rashly and inaccurately labeled an "invasion" but which is, nevertheless, an unprecedented situation.   Instead, O'Rourke bleeds sympathy for the children and suggests (in response to a previous question) that "it also speaks to ultimately our need to reform this country`s immigration laws."

Exploiting the crisis by arguing for comprehensive immigration reform brings to mind the ludicrous charges of a few ultra conservatives that the problem is contrived, manufactured by President Obama to make urgent what Democrats call "reform" and Republicans call "amnesty." It does so even though efforts to pass immigration reform are unrelated to the current crisis, in which some of the entrants are refugees and some merely illegal immigrants.

O'Rourke apparently opposes the Cuellar/Cornyn legislation, but the Texas congressman could have used the occasion to offer a challenge to Representative Cuellar and Senator Cornyn, who have introduced legislation which

would require children looking to stay in the U.S. to file a legal claim with an immigration court within a week of being screened by Department of Health and Human Services officials. A judge would then have 72 hours to make a determination about whether the child is eligible to stay in the U.S.; if not, the child will be sent back to their family in their home country.

The bill also calls for 40 new immigration court judges, as part of the plan to expedite a process that some have called too slow to deal with the buildup along the border.

Forty new immigration judges working eight hours a day (less one hour for lunch, a short break for most judges) for four weeks would yield would yield 1020 hours from the bench.  If the average judge handled (realistically) two cases an hour, that would result in resolution for little more than 2000 children, hardly enough even with existing judges to do more than put a dent in the problem.  As it is, the immigration court backlog is staggering.

Consequently, O'Rourke and like-minded Democrats should call the bluff of Republicans and Democratic Lites (such as Cuellar) by matching their bid and raising them four-fold.  Confront the GOP, which has demonstrated its lack of concern by balking at President Obama's request for $3.7 billion.

With forty new judges grossly insufficient, progressives/liberals can call for 160 new judges. Or 200. Or beyond.    Henry Cuellar, in particular, is determined to call this a "crisis"  (as on Fox News, video below). Skeptics should challenge him to put resources where his mouth is by proposing legislation that would realistically address the situation. Then we could find out what is real- and what is posturing and preening for the camera.

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As For The Nation Of China Itself, Still A Free Pass

This may be a post I will come to regret. By the time this is read, Bob Beckel may have retired from his gig holding down the liberal chair at Fox News.

If he does, Beckel will have been yet another casualty in what conservatives call 'political correctness' and what would more accurately be described as an obsession with language. On Thursday's episode of "The Five," the former Democratic strategist remarked (video, below; transcript, here)

Yes. I came across a story. I have said all along, as bad as Islamist terrorists are, as far as the threat to this country, the Chinese are the single biggest threat to national security of the United States. They have been; they will be. And they can wait. They're very patient. You know what they just did? As usual, we bring them over here, and we teach a bunch of Chinamen -- Chinese people how to do computers.  They go back to China, and they hack into us, right?

The Chinese now have hacked into the Office of Management and Budget - - personnel management. And who do they go after? Everybody with a top security clearance. So China... (MAKES RUDE GESTURE)









The thrust of Beckel's remark was encapsulated in his opinion that the mainland Chinese "are the single biggest threat to national security of the United States. They have been, they will be." Respectively: no, yes, and only a psychic can know.

Back in the Cold War, it was- yes- politically correct on the part of the right and the mainstream media to consider Moscow the greatest threat to the national security of the U.S.A. All along, mainland China posed the greatest danger to the Free World, as the unforced dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued rise of Beijing have made clear to anyone who has, with cold objectivity, paid attention.

Currently, the greatest national security threat to the U.S.A. is Islamic terrorism, though that is not the inspiration for the concerns expressed by the individuals who are calling for Beckel's head.   Taiwanese immigrant and state Senator Ted Lieu, a Democratic candidate for a  U.S. House seat from California, referred to a previous offensive comment by Beckel and contended "We should all be alarmed by the racist, xenophobic comments by Fox News host Bob Beckel. His comments have no place in America, and this is at least the second time he has used racial slurs. He must resign immediately."

Representative Judy Chu is another California Democrat who has called on Beckel to resign. Identifying herself as "Chinese-American, Chu claimed "All we have to do is look to the fear mongering and hysteria of the 1980s that resulted in the murder of Vincent Chin by two white unemployed autoworkers to see how tragedy can occur when racism and xenophobia are tolerated."

Or perhaps the murder occurred because the death penalty in California had been suspended.  Both Chu and I are jumping to unproven- and probably unwarranted- conclusions, though I am not doing it so publicly and do not hold a position of as great responsibility as congresswoman.

The most curious argument for Beckel's resignation, though, came from yet another U.S. Representative from The Golden State, Mike Honda, who argued the talk show co-host "has yet to apologize for these comments" and "as the founder of the Congressional Anti-Bullying Caucus, I know that words hurt, and slurs are used to intimidate. "

There is little likelihood (or even, as soccer people would say, a "nil" chance) that the offensive words were meant to intimidate anyone. Up against the Chinese, Beckel is not the schoolyard bully.  Additionally, the claim that he had not apologized for the recent statement, though technically true, is not only disingenuous but grotesquely misleading.  Honda's fascination with an "apology" is quite bizarre given that the offender immediately corrected himself.

An "apology" surely would not be superior.  Indeed, Beckel has now issued the standard "apology," one in which the speaker says he "apologizes" but does not admit wrongdoing. He stated Sunday

I made some comments last week about the Chinese people which apparently upset some people for which I apologize. However, my comments will not be, I don not apologize for some things I've said about China, and I won't go into the litany of it now because there's too many China apologists in this country, but I will continue to warn the American people how dangerous China is to the American people, the US security and to our business community and but those who were offended I apologize, I do not apologize to the Chinese government or for their habits or for their murders or anything else.

I would have preferred

I apologize for the remark I inadvertently made, and immediately corrected, last week.Although I promptly recognized my mistake, the term used offends many people, is considered derogatory by some, and therefore should not have been uttered. However, my larger point was over the threat posed by the Chinese government, one which some parties in the U.S.A. ignore, in some cases because they have a major financial interest in the continuation of a ruthless, dictatorial regime.

The truth may not set you free, and it may not save Bob Beckel's job, in whatever jeopardy it might be.  But at least it would have been a genuine apology for a thoughtless (albeit immediately corrected) remark and there is some intrinsic value in the truth. Further, it would have been fascinating if Mr. Beckel's critics had been made to defend mainland China, which regime they are insufficiently uncomfortable with.

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Religious Discrimination, Strategically Permitted

Jon Perr of Perrspectives remarks

Already, the Supreme Court has ordered lower courts to reconsider their previous decisions against companies opposing the entire Obamacare contraception mandate while refusing to hear challenges to several victorious firms owned by Catholics objecting to all methods of birth control. In its subsequent provisional ruling in favor of Christian Wheaton College, Justice Sonya Sotomayor warned that the Roberts Court had already revised its two-day-old Hobby Lobby decision. Meanwhile, a group of prominent faith leaders sent a letter to President Obama demanding a religious exemption to his pending executive order forbidding federal contractors from discriminating against current and potential LGBT employees. The wave of lawsuits to come will soon expose the fiction behind Justice Alito's promise...

As Jeffrey Toobin rightly noted, the Roberts Court has previously touted its "narrow" rulings only to later use them as a cudgel to smash past precedent. For example, in his supposedly narrow opinion in the 2009 Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holdervoting rights case, Chief Justice John Roberts invented the doctrine of "equal sovereignty" of the states. Then in his 2013 Shelby County opinion, Roberts proceeded to his equal sovereignty brainchild to completely gut Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Given the opportunity, there is little question that the court's conservatives will expand their Hobby Lobby ruling to "provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice."

Toobin had offered his opinion immediately following the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., et al. Reporting on the Wheaton College action a few days earlier, The New York Time's Adam Liptak wrote

Justice Sotomayor said the majority, which acted on an emergency application, had not only introduced pointless complexity into an already byzantine set of regulations but had also revised its Hobby Lobby decision.

That decision, Justice Sotomayor said, endorsed an arrangement allowing nonprofit groups to sign a form that would transfer the delivery of free contraception under the Affordable Care Act to others. But Thursday’s order rejected the mandatory use of the forms for Wheaton College in Illinois...

On Thursday, the court’s majority said all Wheaton had to do was notify the government in writing “that it is a nonprofit organization that holds itself out as religious and has religious objections to providing coverage for contraception services.”

The difference between a form sent to insurers and plan administrators on the one hand and a letter sent to the government on the other mattered, the college told the justices, “because it believes, as a religious matter, that signing the form would be impermissibly facilitating abortions and is therefore forbidden.”

Now signing a form is facilitating abortion  It must be frustrating for Justice Sotomayor, who seems to be a straight shooter, to be working among men who are brazenly deceitful.  But she knew it was only a matter of time- in this case, three days- before she would have to note "Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”

Were the male Repub Justices even a bit forthright, one of their number would assert that the (unsigned) order in Wheaton College v. Sylvia Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, did not defy the decision (or at least not most of it) in Hobby Lobby. The statement could be made by Justice Alito, who had written the majority opinion in the latter case.

Carefully parsing his words, Alito had pointed out "the decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate," which is literally true given that the plaintiffs had objected specifically and solely to paying for four forms of birth control they claim constitute abortion. That need not, of course, prove a bar to applying the ruling to other instances, even if (as Alito put it) it would not "necessarily" prove the case.

"Nor does" the ruling, Alito maintained, "provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice."  Rather, it provides a shield for employers who might cloak what others would see- misunderstand, in his view- as illegal discrimination.  If the Supreme Court believes it is not illegal discrimination, it is not illegal discrimination.  Discrimination, to be sure; illegal discrimination, apparently not. And there is a lot of discrimination employers may practice which this Court would hold is not illegal.

Once upon a time, conservatives would claim they strove for religious freedom for all, for the opportunity for each person to practice the religion he or she chooses.  Such claims are less common now and should be derided if made at all.  The Fab Five have made that clear:  not all mandates, such as for vaccinations and blood transfusions, which violate a religious conscience are likely to be struck down. Not all religions are created equal, nor are all to be given equal deference, when one of the objectives is not to establish religion but to establish a particular religion.

We do not know the exact contours yet: more bad decisions await before we can determine whether it is Roman Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, or perhaps even a hybrid religious faith the Court recognizes in its effort to tear down the American mosaic. But Justice Alito made it clear a couple of weeks ago: this land is your land (below, Woody Guthrie, with lyrics offensive to The Fab Five), as long as you believe a certain way.

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The Truth Shall Set You Apart

Truth-telling is an unusual commodity in American politics, whether on the local, state, or national level.  So perhaps it's no surprise when we fail to get it from a President or from either of the two individuals of his own party most likely to succeed him.  (The other Party is beyond hope.)

The latest to promote the "they all do it theme" is Vice-President Joe Biden, who on July 11 told (video of a news report, below; the speech itself, here) the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Association

I probably shouldn't say this but then again I'm Joe Biden.... The way things have gotten today- and I'm not singling out any party or group of people, just the politics, the culture- it is, uh, it's become too personal., too corrosive.... You folks, the Democratic/Republican governors are the best hope we have where for bringing back an atmosphere we can disagree without being disagreeable...where we can have significant ideological differences but at the end of the day it's all about finding a solution.











Bipartisanship may be the norm at NGA gatherings but is rejected by GOP governors as well as their members of the House and Senate.  Of the 21 states which have rejected free money- AKA medicaid expansion- wherein the federal government would pay 100% of the cost for three years and 90% thereafter to increase health coverage of poor people, 18 have Repub governors.  The other three- Missouri, Montana, and Virginia- have state legislatures controlled by the GOP (map, below, from The Advisory Board Company).

Biden is only following the lead of President Obama and former Senator Clinton, both of whom have expressed similar bipartisan sentiments, and in venues in which it is completely optional.  Fortunately, a member of the Obama Administration has chosen to be forthright and, not surprisingly, he's someone not running for anything.  Attorney General Eric Holder. Criticizing House Speaker Boehner's move to sue the President and Sarah Palin's call for impeachment of Obama, stated on ABC's "This Week"

For whatever reason, [some] Republicans decided early on that this was a president they were just simply not going to cooperate with.  And over the past five-and-a-half years, we have seen demonstrations of that, where the president has reached out his hand, offered compromises that have simply not been met [in the way] they have been in the past by a Republican Party willing to do the appropriate things.

As Charles Pierce has written, "We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind. This is a national problem." It may no longer matter whether its leaders are sincere or insincere, catering to tea party conservatives, playing a good cop, bad cop routine, or merely having fun at the nation's expense.



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Entitlements As Persons Of (Claimed) Faith

The nine self-identified "civic and religious leaders" may be forgiven a bit of smug satisfaction when they recently wrote

Mr. President, during your first presidential campaign you were asked your views on same-sex marriage. You responded: "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix... I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage."

You justified withholding your support for same-sex marriage, at least in part, by appealing to your Christian faith.

Or as they were too polite to translate, a la Reverend Jeremiah Wright (and many others before him): "The chickens have come home to roost."

President Obama reportedly will issue an Executive Order barring discrimination by federal contractors on the basis of sexual preference or gender identity.    In its letter to Obama, the group, including Reverend Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, is requesting a "robust religious exemption" akin to that in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act recently passed in the Senate and stalled (because of a controversial religious exemption) in the House (Washington Blade cartoon by Ranslem, below).

While conceding "banning discrimination is a good thing," the seven men and two women complain "religious organizations will lose federal funding that allows them to serve others in the national interest due to their organizational identity."  Moreover, "we still live in a nation with different beliefs about sexuality. We must find a way to respect diversity of opinion on this issue in a way that respects the dignity of all parties..."

One is urged to say: equal protection is good for thee, not for me.  More fairly, either these folks believe themselves that discrimination is acceptable or they are saying that other, less fair-minded people, do.  And that these are the individuals or organizations which fund them. Money talks, b_ _ _ _ _ _ _ walks.

The group maintains "all persons are created in the divine image of the creator, and are worthy of respect and love, without exception."   Still, they believe contractors who claim a Christian faith ought to be allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference and gender identity and be the recipient of taxpayer largess in the form of federal grants.  Other contractors must play by a different, somewhat more constraining, set of rules

More artfully than sincerely, the group expresses concern for "the hiring process of these organizations- Christians, Jews, Muslim, and others."  But neither the Old or the New Testament counsels discrimination or provides a rationale for granting an exemption or preference in the law for those who would practice it. Instead, advantage must be proferred unto contractors claiming their own personal interpretation of Christianity or Judaism.

No good deed goes unpunished, it is said. Similarly, offering an olive branch to evangelical leaders is unlikely to deliver the desired results.  Barack Obama had Rick Warren give the invocation at the 2008 presidential inauguration, months after Obama explained he opposed same-sex marriage in part "as a Christian."

But theocrats are little interested in half-measures, compromise, or reaching an accommodation consistent with the wall of separation found in the First Amendment, as we will increasingly see in response to the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision.







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Keep Quiet About Women. It's Divisive.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly should have kept it personal, with claims of her target as ignorant, misleading, or hewing to a double standard. The charges would have been invulnerable to refutation, as in "God exists" or "God does not exist."

Instead, Politico reports

Kelly’s comments came after Pelosi called the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby “a frightening one.”

“We should be afraid of this court, that five guys are determining which contraceptions are legal or not,” Pelosi said Thursday. “It’s not her boss’ business.”

Kelly went after Pelosi’s remarks, saying “Nancy Pelosi either doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or she’s intentionally misleading you,” and called the gendered attack an “attempt to stoke resentment.”

“First of all, the gender of the justices in the Hobby Lobby majority is totally irrelevant,” Kelly said, pointing out that the justices who ruled in the majority for Roe v. Wade were also men. “Does Ms. Pelosi think those justices were ill-equipped to fairly decide that case? Or is it only when a judge disagrees with Ms. Pelosi that his gender is an issue.”

She added, “If Speaker John Boehner made a similar comment about the female Supreme Court justices, Nancy Pelosi would be crying sexism — and that’s what she is guilty of here.”

Kelly called Pelosi’s comments a “gross misrepresentation” of the Hobby Lobby ruling.
“News flash: all birth control was legal before this decision remains legal today,” Kelly said. “The high court simply found that a religious freedom law which was co-sponsored by none other than — wait for it — Nancy Pelosi, sometimes protects corporations from being forced to violate their religious beliefs.”

But the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which the High Court believes protects some corporations from violating their religious beliefs does not pertain to religious beliefs. Rather, it pertains to the exercise of religion, in which Section 1(A) demands "Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion."

It's ludicrous, further, to charge Nancy Pelosi with stoking resentment when it was Justice Alito himself who determined religion should trump law and science when he claimed

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs. Nor does it provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.

If the Justices are sincere (a very dubious proposition), the ruling- issued by five Roman Catholic jurists- is limited to abortion.  News flash: if it were issued by five Protestant evangelicals, it most likely would involve more than abortion (cartoon below from Steve Benson/ Creators Syndicate via Eric Schnurer), given that the Bible's preferences, were the five guys to care, extend far beyond abortion.  Instead, Alito seems to believe of all human activity, only abortion runs afoul of religious belief, a rather narrow view of Scripture, of religion, and of Christianity.  (Note there was no reference to same-sex marriage.)

The four methods of contraception which Hobby Lobby contends amount to abortion simply are not abortion according to federal law. It wasn't Nancy Pelosi but Justice Alito who recognized that, when in a footnote he wrote "The owners of the companies involved in these cases and others who believe that life begins at conception regard these four methods as causing abortions, but federal regulations, which define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, do not so classify them."

Besides violating the spirit of the Constitution, there may be no better way to stoke resentment than actively to promote establishment of one religion- whether Roman Catholicism, evangelical Christianity or, more generally, Christianity.  Public policy analyst Eric Schnurer, the day after the decision was handed down, explained

The court has always been hostile to the religious freedom claims of minority religions – ranging from Mormon polygamists to Native American peyote users to Jewish Army chaplains. So hobby stores owned by Seventh Day Adventists are probably in for a disappointment.

Alito is less convincing in beating back the question from dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about whether businesses can now insist that their religious scruples prohibit employing or serving certain people. The obvious first instance of such objection – which is already wending its way to through the courts – is religious-based objection to serving gay customers. While less socially acceptable today, the same logic applies to racial discrimination, much of which was, and, if it were sanctioned by the law, likely would again be allegedly religiously-based.

Alito tut-tuts such a possibility, but it’s hard to see why. The court seizes on Hobby Lobby’s status as a closely-held family businesses to carve out a new religious freedom for corporations based on their size. It insists that this right only applies to businesses of a certain size and legal type (“closely-held” as defined by the Internal Revenue Code), not large corporations. 

But this runs counter to the entire logic of the decision itself. The majority emphasizes that, in recognizing religious rights, there is no basis for discriminating between one form of legal organization instead of another – in this case, non-profits versus for-profits, or sole proprietorships instead of closely-held corporations. The majority opinion itself thus mandates that something as fundamental as religious freedom not be held to turn on even less consequential differences in legal form. Why, as the tax code defines “closely-held,” just five major stockholders? If Jacob’s 11 sons – excluding the one who turned out to be a liberal and went into the government – all take over their father’s sheep-herding business, shouldn’t they be eligible to assert their religious beliefs, too? This supposed distinction is unlikely to hold up....

Until yesterday, there was a bright line test concerning whether the government could override religious convictions. If you were engaged in private religious observance (at least, of the mainstream kind), the government couldn’t infringe on your beliefs; if you left the private realm and started doing things for commercial purposes, then you had to submit to government regulation, even if you had a religious belief that you shouldn’t have to. Don’t want a black houseguest for religious reasons? That’s your right. Don’t want to serve a black hotel guest for religious reasons? Too bad.

Now, the commerce/non-commercial distinction no longer matters (interesting in its own right for the court’s apparent obliviousness to any difference between religious and commercial activities). It only matters how many shareholders you have, at least for now, and whether your religious concerns, unlike vaccination and transfusion, mirror the justices’.

Keep an eye out for Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods in church some Sunday morning exercising their religion.  Perhaps Megyn Kelly can meet us there and bring with her Wakefern Food Corporation, which can lead the congregation in prayer; Verizon, to lead a hymn sing; and Barnabas Health, which might administer communion (cartoon below from Tom Tomorrow). Wal-Mart can join us to boast about the 15 cents it put in the offering plate because, as it realizes, everyone else will pick up the slack.

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In An Earlier Life, He Was A Federal Prosecutor

When people say Governor Chris Christie is a big man, they're not talking about courage.  NJ.com reported Monday

Gov. Chris Christie said today that he declined to meet with parents of first graders who were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting last week because he had already decided to veto the controversial gun bill.

Christie defended his decision to recently veto the bill to reduce the permitted size of ammunition magazines from 15 rounds to 10 and said he declined to discuss the bill with parents of slain children because the conditional veto was already signed by the time they requested a meeting.

“I already signed it,” he said during a news conference in Keansburg. “It would have been really hypocritical for me to sit down and act like I was listening to their arguments, again, when in fact I already signed the conditional veto.”

The comments from the potential Republican presidential contender in 2016 came less than a week after two of the parents — Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden — visited Christie’s office in Trenton last week to present more than 55,000 petitions supporting the bill to limit the size of magazines.

The parents contended that more lives would have been saved during the mass shooting — 20 children and six adults were slain at the school in Newtown, Conn. — if the gunman had taken more time to reload his weapon.

After the parents left the New Jersey Statehouse, Christie’s office released the conditional veto, which was received with harsh criticism by the Democrat-controlled Legislature.

Evidently, though, Christie had not signed the bill before a meeting was requested.  Barden, whose 7-year-old son was killed at Sandy Hook, maintained

Christie must have made his mind up to veto the bill weeks before it was announced, since he declined a meeting with them going back to May 21.

"It makes me scratch my head," Barden said. "If he made his decision back then, what was he waiting for? Everyone knows his track record for vetoing controversial bills on the evening of a holiday weekend on the hopes it wouldn’t get noticed," he said.

At a news conference three days after the veto, the Governor complained

Are we saying then that the 10 children on the clip that they advocate for, that their lives are less valuable? If you take the logical conclusion of their argument, you go to zero. Because every life is valuable. So, why 10? Why not 6? Why not 1? Why not zero? Why not just ban guns completely?

Maybe because in the view of the U.S. Supreme Court-which Christie may have noticed- banning guns by probably would be unconstitutional. Although it applied specifically to federal law and federal enclaves such as the District of Columbia, the Court's majority opinion in Heller held "the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home."   Two years later in McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Alito- writing for the majority- misleadingly contended “It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty." In March, Justice Kennedy, refusing to block implementation of a law banning high-capacity magazines, found the burden "light" because "(m)agazines having a capacity to accept more than ten rounds are hardly crucial for citizens to exercise their right to bear arms" (visual below from Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence).

Someone ought to tell the Governor, once reportedly a U.S. attorney, that the Supreme Court apparently currently believes there is a constitutional right to possess firearms with magazines holding up to ten rounds. That could be why the NJ legislation specified a maximum of ten rounds, rather than 6 or 1.  Pretty simple for someone who purports to be a lawyer.   Even Christie fan Joe Scarborough, noting the presidential hopeful was pandering to the NRA, remarked "It was painful watching Chris Christie talking about, somehow limiting clips to 10 bullets means that you don't care about the 10 children that will be killed by those bullets... That is just one of the stupidest arguments I think I've ever heard. But when you have to push yourself to defend extreme positions, these are the things I guess you have to do." And Joe Scarborough is an expert on stupid arguments.

This is the Republican (along with Jeb Bush) the media touts whenever possible as presidential timber.  Sometime before Bridgegate, multi-millionaire Chris Matthews (effecting his common guy pose) commented "Regular people in my family and they’re very regular people —they like him because that ‘at-ey-tude’ — as we say in Philly, we pronounce it that way — ‘at-ey-tude.’”

He does have attitude- attitude which extends to the families of victims of gun violence.


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