Thursday, June 30, 2016

Another Clinton Email Scandal Bombshell



ANOTHER EMAIL SCANDAL BOMBSHELL: Top Clinton aide Huma Abedin admitted in a deposition this week that Hillary Clinton didn’t want “anybody” to have access to her emails.
 
The Associated Press reports: Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin said in a legal proceeding that Clinton did not want the State Department emails that she sent and received on her private computer server to be accessible to "anybody," according to transcripts released Wednesday.
 
Her comments provided new insights into the highly unusual decision by the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate to operate a private email server in her basement to conduct government business as secretary of state.
 
Abedin also said under oath that she was not aware whether Clinton personally deleted any emails during her tenure as secretary.
 
Abedin told lawyers for the conservative group Judicial Watch in a deposition Monday that she could not recall whether she or Clinton discussed with any State Department officials Clinton's use of her server exclusively for government business.
 
MORE BAD NEWS FOR HILLARY:  A federal judge is expanding an investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Clinton Foundation donors.
 
 National Review reports: A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to produce the e-mail records of Hillary Clinton’s scheduler during her tenure as secretary of state, expanding an investigation being pursued by conservative nonprofit Citizens United into the overlap between Clinton’s official travel and her meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors.
 
Citizens United is slated to receive all e-mails sent to and from Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s State Department scheduler, in the two-week periods before each of 14 international trips Clinton took during her four years in office.
 
As part of a joint filing with the State Department on Monday, Citizens United presented the judge with several pieces of evidence suggesting Valmoro deliberately struck from the official schedule a December 6, 2012 dinner in Dublin, Ireland with several Clinton Foundation and Clinton campaign donors, organized by Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly.
 
Though Valmoro was made aware of the Dublin meeting through an earlier e-mail chain, neither Clinton’s archived daily calendar nor her detailed official schedule make any note of it.  Citizens United characterizes the State Department’s decision to go along with the filing as an acknowledgement that Clinton did, in fact, maintain a secret schedule.
 
 ATTORNEY GENERAL LORETTA LYNCH’S SCANDALOUS CONFLICT OF INTEREST:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is raising eyebrows after privately meeting with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac despite her agency’s ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server.
 
 CBS News reports: As his wife is under federal investigation for her use of a private email server, former President Bill Clinton met privately with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix Airport Monday evening in what both sides say was an unplanned encounter.
 
An aide to Bill Clinton confirmed to CBS News that the meeting wasn't planned in advance: Clinton realized she would be on the same tarmac at the same time and wanted to say hello, adding that it's a courtesy Clinton "always extends" to public officials.
 
The meeting comes as former secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still under investigation for her email practices--and also came the day before House Republicans released a report criticizing the Obama administration's response to the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
 
News complied by the RNC.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

House GOP Report: Despite eyewitness accounts, Clinton, administration pushed video explanation for Benghazi


By  Catherine Herridge,  Bret Baier
 
EXCLUSIVE –  The claim that the fatal 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks were sparked by an anti-Muslim video was crafted in Washington by Obama administration appointees and reflected neither eyewitness nor real-time reports from the Americans under siege, according to the final report of the GOP-led Benghazi Select Committee.

The GOP report, released Tuesday, followed by less than a day a report by the Democrats on the panel saying that security at the Benghazi, Libya facility was “woefully inadequate” but former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional protection.
According to portions of the Republican report reviewed by Fox News, one U.S. agent at the American outpost in Benghazi, whose name was withheld for security reasons, told the committee he first heard “some kind of chanting.”

Then that sound was immediately followed by “explosions” and “gunfire, then roughly 70 people rushing into the compound with an assortment of “AK-47s, grenades, RPG’s … a couple of different assault rifles,” the agent said.
In addition, a senior watch officer at the State Department's diplomatic security command described the Sept. 11, 2012, strikes as "a full on attack against our compound.”

When asked whether he saw or heard a protest prior to the attacks, the officer replied, "zip, nothing, nada," according to the Republican majority report.
“None of the information coming directly from the agents on the ground in Benghazi during the attacks mentioned anything about a video or a protest. The firsthand accounts made their way to the office of the Secretary through multiple channels quickly …,” the report concluded.

Watch Benghazi Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and committee member Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., Monday at 6 p.m. ET on Fox News' “Special Report with Bret Baier.” 
U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, foreign service officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, were killed in the attacks.

Five days later, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice went on every national Sunday talk show. She told Fox News Sunday, “What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world.”
The GOP committee report also identified for the first time a White House meeting that was convened roughly three hours into the attack and included deputies to senior Cabinet members and Clinton.

Stevens was missing at the time. But the report found “much of the conversation focused on the video (which) is surprising given no direct link or solid evidence existed connecting the attacks in Benghazi and the video at the time ….”
The report found that “five of the 10 action items from the rough notes of the 7:30pm meeting reference the video.”

Unlike the Usama bin Laden raid in 2011, in which Clinton, President Obama and his national security team watched events unfold from the Situation Room, they never gathered for Benghazi.
Clinton issued the only statement that night from the administration, following the White House meeting. It read in part: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

However, Clinton said something very different privately.
In an email provided to the Select Committee, Clinton told daughter Chelsea, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group.”

Clinton also told Egypt’s prime minister the following day: “We know that the attacks in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack -- not a protest.”
Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Benghazi committee member, told Fox News in advance of the report’s release that the report is new and significant because it’s the first to include interviews from “everybody on the ground” in Benghazi.

More than 30 people’s lives were at risk that night, and the majority worked at the secret CIA annex in Benghazi.
Pompeo also said the findings show “it’s unambiguous the administration knew immediately it was a terror attack. And the story of fog of war was known to be false immediately by everyone in the administration.”

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has seen her campaign plagued by questions about whether she and the rest of the State Department provided adequate security for Americans before the attacks and about why the administration continued to tell Americans the attacks were inspired by the video.
Committee Republicans say the deputies’ meeting, in which Clinton was involved, on the night of the Benghazi attack shows she’s not ready for the so-called “3 a.m. call.”

The report interviewed more than 80 witnesses previously not called before Congress to testify.   
Among them was Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, who with political adviser David Plouffe prepped Rice for her national TV appearances claiming the video was responsible for the terrorist attack.

Rice said her statements were based on the best available information, but nobody from the intelligence community such as the CIA director or the Director of National Intelligence briefed Rice. That was done by the political appointees.
In fact, a Sept. 14, 2012 memo from Rhodes included the subject line: "RE: PREP Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 pm ET."

The email was sent to a dozen members of the administration's inner circle, including key members of the White House communications team such as then-Press Secretary Jay Carney, who also pushed the video narrative in the days after the attacks.
In the email, Rhodes specifically draws attention to the anti-Islam Internet video, without distinguishing whether the Benghazi attack was different from protests elsewhere, including one day earlier in Cairo.

The Rhodes email, which was a catalyst for the Select Committee, was first obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal court lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
The email lists the following two goals, among others: "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy” and “to reinforce the President and Administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges."

Rhodes was the same official who signed off on Clinton’s statement the night of the attack linking the video to Benghazi.
The report found the post attack intelligence analysis had errors, contradicting the eyewitness accounts that night, and it alleges the administration latched onto the faulty analysis to defend and justify their misleading statements to the public.

There were in fact two sets of talking points – the White House version by Rhodes and the one by the CIA.  When editing the CIA's version, Deputy Director Michael Morell knew his personnel on the ground disputed the protest analysis, but he gave the final say to his analysts in Washington, thousands of miles away.

Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Why George Will's Moral Narcissism Matters



By Roger L Simon

 

I admit to having moral narcissism on the brain, having just published a book on the subject, but the announcement by conservative columnist George Will that he has left the Republican Party and has registered "unaffiliated" in the state of Maryland is such a pure example of MN that I wish I had had a chance to add a few pages about it, maybe even a chapter.

Most of the examples in I Know Best are from the liberal-progressive side, so it would have been good for balance at least to have included such an esteemed conservative as Will -- a man who has now turned Lesley Gore's 1963 hit "It's My Party" on its head by declaring in a speech at the Federalist Society that "this is not my party."

Was it ever his party? I thought it belonged to all its members. But never mind. How does Will's proclamation demonstrate moral narcissism and why does that matter? Allow me to be a little narcissistic myself and quote from my book:

What you believe, or claim to believe or say you believe—not what you do or how you act or what the results of your actions may be—defines you as a person and makes you “good.” It is how your life will be judged by others and by yourself. In 19th-century France, the gastronome Jean Brillat-Savarin told us that “You are what you eat.” In 21st-century America, almost all of us seem to have concluded that “you are what you say you are. You are what you proclaim your values to be, irrespective of their consequences.” That is moral narcissism.

So George Will has proclaimed himself to be free and above the Republican Party -- most specifically the Republican Party whose current standard bearer by millions of votes is Donald Trump, a man Will obviously abhors. As the columnist said in his speech, Republicans should “make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House.”

Will definitely gets to be "good" -- according to my definition. But what about those consequences, the pesky results of his decision? PJ Media's Nicholas Ballasy asked Will some interesting questions after the speech, among them whether he was bothered by Hillary Clinton choosing one or possibly several justices for the Supreme Court, changing the nature of the court for decades.

Will replied,  “Sure, but I’m also concerned with the fact that I do not really believe Republicans think clearly enough about what they really want in judges. Republicans have given us Earl Warren, Brennan, John Paul Stevens, Burger, who was kind of mediocre, Blackmun. Having a Republican president is not an answer in itself."

Really? Nothing is indeed perfect, but as Will well knows, Trump has announced a solid conservative list of potential Supreme Court nominees far in advance of his nomination, something never done before, to my knowledge. Anyone rational (i.e. not coming from a place of moral narcissism) would certainly place his bet with Trump over Hillary Clinton when it comes to Supreme Court appointments.

Another crucial area a rational conservative would place his bet with Trump over Hillary is immigration, especially immigration from countries that are hotbeds of terrorism. If you don't want more San Bernardinos and Orlandos or something even worse, wouldn't you gamble on Trump too? Ditto if you want lower tax rates, fewer regulations, a free market economy and the preservation of the Second Amendment -- all standard-issue Republican positions. Most of us want to get these things accomplished now -- especially with the willy-nilly Islamic immigration, greater even than Obama's, that Hillary is proposing.  We have no desire to wait for years for an unnamed savior, as Will urges if only we would grit our teeth. By then the odds will be stacked even further against conservatives than they are at present, quite possibly to an extent that it will be impossible for the right ever to win.

Obviously feeling embarrassment (he should), Will now asserts his real reason for departing the Republican Party was Trump's attack on the Latino judge. Indeed,  Donald was depressingly unsophisticated in the way he went about that, but I suspect Will's actual motivation for abjuring Trump -- and the Republican masses who voted for him in such record numbers -- is actually more a matter of class.

We might call Will's class the Moral Narcissist Bourgeoisie (MNB) that resides so comfortably in Washington, irrespective of political party, dining at the best restaurants and enjoying the cultural benefits of the city while their real estate values mount into the stratosphere, only to appear in all their excellence before the great unwashed on the Sunday shows. It's a terrific life if you can have it, but because of Trump -- and even more because of Brexit -- it is under threat.

What we have on our hands is a genuine class war, but the classes don't line up as before. It's not entirely about money. It's now the elites versus the people and it's not just local, it's global.  Those who choose to line up with elites might want to keep in mind the words of a man who was pretty elite himself -- William F. Buckley: "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

But Will's okay. He went to Princeton.

Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His new book—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn't Already— is just published by Encounter Books June 14, 2016.  You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can hear an interview about the book with Mark Levin here. You can order the book here.
 

Warren: A Liberal Dream, A Clinton Nightmare

If There Were Ever A Pick To Overshadow Clinton And Highlight Her Weaknesses, The Massachusetts Senator Fits The Bill
Today, Clinton campaigns with Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Senator pushed by liberals as their "dream vice presidential pick."
•Warren has been at odds with Clinton over the regulation of Wall Street, a Sanders voter cause celebre, on which Warren has accused Clinton of kowtowing to donors and shifting positions.
•Warren slams politicians, like Clinton, who have embraced large amounts of outside spending in campaigns.
•Warren criticized the Transpacific Partnership and other free trade deals that Clinton championed until recently.
•Warren's criticism of the Iraq War and opposition to arming Syrian rebels contrasts with Clinton's Iraq War vote and desire to escalate U.S. involvement in Syria.
•Warren supports limiting surveillance programs that Clinton defends.
•Warren wants to expand social security benefits, but Clinton refuses to rule out cuts.
•Given their stark differences, it's no surprise Warren dragged her feet before selling out to endorse Clinton.
WARREN ATTACKS THE SAME WALL STREET INTERESTS THAT HAVE BANKROLLED THE CLINTONS FOR YEARS
Warren Claimed "Powerful Wall Street Businesses Pay Barely Disguised Bribes" To Obtain Laws That Will Benefit Them And Protect Corporate Interests. "
•Corporate executives and government officials spin through a revolving door, making sure that the interests of powerful corporations are carefully protected.
•Powerful Wall Street businesses pay barely disguised bribes, offering millions of dollars to trusted employees to go to Washington for a few years to make policies that will benefit exactly those same Wall Street businesses.
•And corporations and trade groups fund study after study that just so happen to support the special rule or exception the industry is looking for."
 (Elizabeth Warren, Floor Speech On The Influence Of Money In Politics , Washington, DC, 1/21/16)
Clinton Is Steadfastly Refusing To Release The Transcripts Of The Paid Speeches She Gave To Wall Street Banks.
Over A 15 Year Period, The Clintons Gave 164 Speeches To The Financial Sector, Earning At Least $35 Million. 
•Clinton efforts capped a nearly 15-year period in which Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, made at least $35 million by giving 164 speeches to financial services, real estate and insurance companies after leaving the White House in 2001, according to an Associated Press analysis of public disclosure forms and records released by her campaign.
(Lisa Lerer and Ken Thomas, "Since '01, Clintons Collected $35M From Financial Businesses, The Associated Press , 11/24/15) 
The Clintons Have Long Been Cozy With Wall Street And Profited Personally From Their Financial Industry Connections
•Clinton's windfalls from Wall Street banks and other financial services firms - $3 million in paid speeches and $17 million in campaign contributions over the years - have become a major vulnerability in states with early nomination contests.
•Some party officials who remain undecided in the 2016 presidential race see her as overly cozy with big banks and other special interests.
•At a time when liberals are ascendant in the party, many Democrats believe her merely having "represented Wall Street as a senator from New York," as Clinton reminded viewers in an October debate, is bad enough.
(Patrick Healy, "Wall Street Ties Linger As Image Issue For Hillary Clinton," The New York Times , 11/21/15)
Clinton's Top Contributors To Her Senate And Presidential Campaigns Have Been Wall Street Employees.
•Clinton's top two contributors over those years were employees from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the center found.
(Lisa Lerer and Ken Thomas, "Since '01, Clintons Collected $35M From Financial Businesses, The Associated Press , 11/24/15)
For Decades, The Clintons "Made Historic Inroads On Wall Street, Pulling In At Least $69 Million In Political Contributions."
•The Clintons kept big contributors in their orbit for decades by methodically wooing competing interest groups - toggling between their liberal base and powerful constituencies, according to donors, friends and aides who have known the couple since their Arkansas days.
•They made historic inroads on Wall Street, pulling in at least $69 million in political contributions from the employees and PACs of banks, insurance companies, and securities and investment firms.
•Wealthy hedge fund managers S. Donald Sussman and David E. Shaw are among their top campaign supporters, having given more than $1 million each.
(Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Marayanswamy, "Inside The Clinton Donor Network," The Washington Post, 11/19/15)
Wall Street Strongly Supported Clinton's 2000 Senate Campaign According To The Washington Post's Analysis.
•Clinton had just been elected with the strong support of the financial sector, which contributed $2.1 million of the $30 million she raised in 2000, one of the largest industries to back her, The Post's analysis found.
(Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Marayanswamy, "Inside The Clinton Donor Network," The Washington Post, 11/19/15)
Complied by the RNC.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

The Perils Of The Political Elite In Britian And America


USA TODAY
Britain's forgotten voters — and ours

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

America, too, is experiencing a populist upheaval, of which Donald Trump’s candidacy is more of a symptom than a cause.

So the post-Brexit number-crunching is over and it turns out that the decisive support for Britain’s leaving the EU came not from right-wing nationalists but from working-class Labour voters. This offers some lessons for British and European politicians — and for us in America, too.

Much of Britain’s prosperity in recent years has centered on London, which has done very well and become very pleased with itself. As Peter Mandler writes in Dissent, this turned out to be a problem. London occupies a huge place in British society — as if Washington, D.C., New York, Hollywood, and perhaps Silicon Valley were all in the same place. But that leaves the rest of the country feeling somewhat left out, and deeply suspicious of the people running things, especially as the people running things seem to hold the rest of the country in contempt, openly mocking the traditional, the middle-class, the non-Metropolitan.

Mandler writes, “London, a young, thriving, creative, cosmopolitan city, seems the model multicultural community, a great European capital. But it is also the home of all of Britain’s elites—the economic elites of “the City” (London’s Wall Street, international rather than European), a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

The result, Mandler writes, is that “For the rest of the country has felt more and more excluded, not only from participation in the creativity and prosperity of London, but more crucially from power. . . . A majority of people around the United Kingdom are feeling like non-people, un-citizens, their lives jerked about like marionettes by wire-pullers far away. In those circumstances, very bad things indeed can be expected.”

Given a chance, these people seized an opportunity to give the wires a yank of their own. A lot of people felt powerless, and the political system not only didn’t address that, but seemed to glory in it.

But will leaders learn the lesson? It seems doubtful. As Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle observed about the post-Brexit reaction, they mostly seemed to double down. “The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment has been on full display on social media. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly this strategy had just failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down. . . . Or perhaps they were just unable to grasp what I noted in a column last week: that nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this at their peril. A lot people do not view their country the way some elites do: as though the nation were something like a rental apartment — a nice place to live, but if there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll happily swap it for a new one. In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.”

America, of course, faces the same kind of division, as Dana Loesch writes in her new book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run A Country You’ve Never Been To. Every once in a while, she notes, a publisher or a newspaper from a coastal city will send a reporter, like an intrepid African explorer of the 19th century, to report on the odd beliefs and doings of the inhabitants of the interior. But even the politicians who represent Flyover Country tend to spend most of their time — and, crucially, their post-elective careers — in Washington, DC.

Over the past few decades, Washington has gone from a sleepy town with restaurants and real estate priced to fit a civil servant’s salary to a glittering city with prices that match a K street lobbyist’s salary. The disconnect from regular Americans is much greater. And the public expressions of contempt toward ordinary Americans — Loesch’s book collects quite a few — make things much, much worse.

America, too, is experiencing a populist upheaval, of which Donald Trump’s candidacy is more of a symptom than a cause. It seems unlikely that the political elites of Britain and the EU will take the Brexit vote as encouragement to raise their game. Will America’s political class do better? I hope so, but I’m not optimistic.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
 

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Henry "Hank" Paulson Who Says He Will Vote For Hillary Is The Former Chairman Of Goldman Sachs

By Frances Rice

So, the speeches Hillary Clinton made to her rich, greedy Wall Street cronies are starting to pay off.
Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman Henry M. "Hank" Paulson Jr. who was Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush announced that he will vote for Hillary Clinton. What a surprise.

So, just who is Hank Paulson? Below are two articles, written during the time Paulson became President Bush's Treasury secretary.
Here are the most damning parts of the article published by The Washington Post  about Paulson after the 2008 financial crisis:
"The plan to rescue the US financial industry arrogates virtually unlimited money and power over the financial affairs of the state to the office of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Paulson is a figure with a long history of intimate connections to the political and financial elite.
---
"Paulson then handsomely benefited from the speculative boom. This wealth was based on financial manipulation and did nothing to create real value in the economy. On the contrary, the extraordinary enrichment of individuals like Paulson was the corollary to the dismantling of the real economy, the bankrupting of the government, and the impoverishment of masses the world over.
"Paulson was compensated to the tune of $30 million in 2004 and took home $37 million in 2005. In his career at Goldman Sachs he built up a personal net worth of over $700 million, according to estimates."
 
________________

 
The good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown
Blameworthy

Hank Paulson


Photo Illustration; Paulson: Susan Walsh / AP; Getty

When Paulson left the top job at Goldman Sachs to become Treasury Secretary in 2006, his big concern was whether he'd have an impact. He ended up almost single-handedly running the country's economic policy for the last year of the Bush Administration. Impact? You bet. Positive? Not yet. The three main gripes against Paulson are that he was late to the party in battling the financial crisis, letting Lehman Brothers fail was a big mistake and the big bailout bill he pushed through Congress has been a wasteful mess.



________________

 
Who is Henry Paulson?

By Tom Eley

 23 September 2008

The plan to rescue the US financial industry arrogates virtually unlimited money and power over the financial affairs of the state to the office of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Paulson is a figure with a long history of intimate connections to the political and financial elite.
In 1970, fresh from the Masters program of the Harvard Business School, Paulson entered the Nixon administration, working first as staff assistant to the assistant secretary of defense. In 1972-73, Paulson worked as office assistant to John Erlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs. Erlichman was one of the key figures involved in organizing President Richard Nixon’s notorious “plumbers” unit that carried out illegal covert operations against the president’s political opponents, including espionage, blackmail, and revenge. Ehlichman resigned in 1973, and in 1975 he was convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy, and was imprisoned for 18 months.

Utilizing his connections, Paulson went to work for Goldman Sachs in 1974. In a 2007 feature, the British newspaper the Guardian wrote, “Not only was he well connected enough to get the job [in the Nixon White House], but well connected enough to resign in the thick of the Watergate scandal without ever getting caught up in the fallout. He went straight to Goldman back home in Illinois.”
Paulson rose through the ranks of Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner in 1982, co-head of investment banking in 1990, chief operating officer in 1994. In 1998 he forced out his co-chairman Jon Corzine “in what amounted to a coup,” according to New York Times economics correspondent Floyd Norris, and took over the post of CEO.

Goldman Sachs is perhaps the single best-connected Wall Street firm. Its executives routinely go in and out of top government posts. Corzine went on to become US senator from New Jersey and is now the state’s governor. Corzine’s predecessor, Stephen Friedman, served in the Bush administration as assistant to the president for economic policy and as chairman of the National Economic Council (NEC). Friedman’s predecessor as Goldman Sachs CEO, Robert Rubin, served as chairman of the NEC and later treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
Agence France Press, in a 2006 article on Paulson’s appointment, “Has Goldman Sachs Taken Over the Bush Administration?” noted that, in addition to Paulson, “[t]he president’s chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Jeffery Reuben, are Goldman alumni.”

“But the flow goes both ways,” the article continued, “Goldman recently hired Robert Zoellick, who stepped down as the US deputy secretary of state, and Faryar Shirzad, who worked as one of Bush’s national security advisors.”
Prior to being selected as treasury secretary, Paulson was a major individual campaign contributor to Republican candidates, giving over $336,000 of his own money between 1998 and 2006.

Since taking office, Paulson has overseen the destruction of three of Goldman Sachs’ rivals. In March, Paulson helped arrange the fire sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase. Then, a little more than a week ago, he allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, while simultaneously organizing the absorption of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America. This left only Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as major investment banks, both of which were converted on Sunday into bank holding companies, a move that effectively ended the existence of the investment bank as a distinct economic form.
In the months leading up to his proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Paulson had already used his office to dole out hundreds of billions of dollars. After his July 2008 proposal for $70 billion to resolve the insolvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, Paulson organized the government takeover of the two mortgage-lending giants for an immediate $200 billion price tag, while making the government potentially liable for hundreds of billions more in bad debt. He then organized a federal purchase of an 80 percent stake in the giant insurer American International Group (AIG) at a cost of $85 billion.

These bailouts have been designed to prevent a chain reaction collapse of the world economy, but more importantly they aimed to insulate and even reward the wealthy shareholders, like Paulson, primarily responsible for the financial collapse.
Paulson bears a considerable amount of personal responsibility for the crisis.

Paulson, according to a celebratory 2006 BusinessWeek article entitled “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington,” was “one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits.” Under Paulson’s watch, that meant “taking on more debt: $100 billion in long-term debt in 2005, compared with about $20 billion in 1999. It means placing big bets on all sorts of exotic derivatives and other securities.”
According to the International Herald Tribune, Paulson “was one of the first Wall Street leaders to recognize how drastically investment banks could enhance their profitability by betting with their own capital instead of acting as mere intermediaries.” Paulson “stubbornly assert[ed] Goldman’s right to invest in, advise on and finance deals, regardless of potential conflicts.”

Paulson then handsomely benefited from the speculative boom. This wealth was based on financial manipulation and did nothing to create real value in the economy. On the contrary, the extraordinary enrichment of individuals like Paulson was the corollary to the dismantling of the real economy, the bankrupting of the government, and the impoverishment of masses the world over.
Paulson was compensated to the tune of $30 million in 2004 and took home $37 million in 2005. In his career at Goldman Sachs he built up a personal net worth of over $700 million, according to estimates.

After Paulson’s ascension to the treasury, his colleagues at Goldman Sachs carried on the bonanza. At the end of 2006, Paulson’s successor Lloyd Blankfein was handed over a $53.4 million year-end bonus, while 11 other Goldman Sachs executives raked in $150 million in year-end bonuses combined. That year, the top investment firms Goldman Sacks, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns handed out $36 billion in bonuses. At the end of 2007, the executives of the same firms, excepting Merrill, were handed another $30 billion.

Democrats Support Gun Control That Has Racist Roots

 
The Dark Secret of Jim Crow and the Racist Roots of Gun Control

By Dave Kopel

America's 1st Freedom, March 2011. More articles by Kopel on civil rights and gun control are available here.

Jim Crow is alive and well.

School children today are taught that “Jim Crow” was the name for a legal system of racial oppression, which began after Reconstruction, particularly in the South, and reached its nadir in the early 20th century. Children are also taught that Jim Crow was banished by legal reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Yet in one important part of American life, Jim Crow continues to thrive—the legal foundation of restrictive and oppressive gun control that was built by Jim Crow. The Jim Crow cases continue to hobble the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Shockingly, the Jim Crow laws and legacy are lauded by some persons who consider themselves liberal and tolerant. In the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that asserted that District of Columbia v. Heller should be overturned, and that state and local governments should be allowed to ban guns. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the dissent. That dissent included a litany of restrictive American gun control statutes and court cases, many of them the products of Jim Crow.

Previous issues of America’s 1st Freedom have told the story of how the defeated Confederate states enacted the Black Codes, which explicitly restricted gun possession and carrying by the freedmen. Sometimes these laws facilitated the activities of the terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan, America’s first gun control organization. The top item on the Klan’s agenda was confiscating arms from the freedmen, the better to terrorize them afterward.

Outraged, the Reconstruction Congress responded with the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1870—every one of them aimed at racial subordination in general and racist gun control laws in particular.

President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), who would later serve as president of the National Rifle Association, vigorously prosecuted Klansmen, and even declared martial law when necessary to suppress KKK violence.

Reconstruction formally ended in 1877 with the inauguration of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Even before that, white supremacist “redeemer” governments had taken over one Southern state after another.

Because the new 14th Amendment forbade any state to deny “the equal protection of the laws,” gun control statutes aimed at blacks could no longer be written in overtly racial terms. Instead, the South created racially neutral laws designed to disarm freedmen. Some laws prohibited inexpensive firearms while protecting more expensive military guns owned by former Confederate soldiers. Meanwhile, other laws imposed licensing systems or carry restrictions. As a Florida Supreme Court justice later acknowledged, these laws were “never intended to be applied to the white population” (Watson v. Stone, 1941).

Southern courts generally upheld these laws. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these court precedents played a substantial role in maintaining white supremacy by facilitating unofficial—but government-tolerated—violence against blacks and civil rights advocates. Today, these racist laws are the foundation of continuing infringements of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Let’s take a state-by-state look at how the system worked—and continues to work.

Tennessee

Setting a pattern that was typical in the South, Tennessee courts initially protected the right to arms, but then abandoned the field as Jim Crow took over. In 1870, the Tennessee Legislature prohibited the carrying of “a dirk, sword-cane, Spanish stiletto, belt or pocket pistol or revolver,” either openly or concealed. The Tennessee Supreme Court addressed the ban in the well-known and still-influential 1871 case, Andrews v. State.

The Andrews court stated that people had a right to arms, including the right to buy guns and ammunition, to take guns to gunsmiths and to carry guns and ammunition for purposes of sale and repair.

The court rejected the notion that the right to arms was a “political right,” like voting or jury service, which belonged to only a subset of the people. Rather, the right to arms was a civil right to be enjoyed by all citizens.

The right to carry in public could be regulated, but not prohibited: “The power to regulate does not fairly mean the power to prohibit; on the contrary, to regulate necessarily involves the existence of the thing or act to be regulated.”

In this particular case, Andrews had been carrying a repeating pistol (what we would today call a large revolver). The legislature could not ban the carrying of this type of arm, which was particularly useful for militia service: “The pistol known as the repeater is a soldier’s weapon—skill in the use of which will add to the efficiency of the soldier. If such is the character of the weapon here designated, then the prohibition of the statute is too broad to be allowed to stand. …”

The legislature, however, was determined to stamp out the right to carry. So it promptly passed a new law banning the carrying of any handgun “other than an army pistol, or such as are commonly carried and used in the United States Army, and in no case shall it be lawful for any person to carry such army pistol publicly or privately about his person in any other manner than openly in his hands.”

The new statute contradicted Andrews' affirmation of the right to buy any type of handgun in a store and carry it home. The law still allowed any model of handgun to be taken home, but the buyer would have to put the gun in a cart or wagon, rather than carry it. While the law allowed the carrying—for any purpose, and in public—of army model handguns, the requirement that the gun be carried “in his hands” was likely to provoke fear and almost certain to cause accidents. In effect, the law went as far as possible to outlaw all handgun possession while maintaining a pretense of honoring the right to bear arms.

Unfortunately, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the ban without even discussing whether the law violated the Andrews standard (State v. Wilburn, 1872).

Then in 1879, the legislature banned the sale of all handguns “except army or navy pistols.” The obvious effect was to prevent freedmen from owning handguns. Almost all were poor and could not afford the expensive Army and Navy models. Meanwhile, the ex-confederate soldiers already had plenty of Army and Navy models that they had been allowed to take home under the surrender terms for the Confederate army.

Arkansas

Like Tennessee, Arkansas had an unusual constitutional right to arms, which guaranteed the right only for the “common defense”—this was the basis for limiting the right only to militia-type arms. Notably, when the U.S. Senate was considering the Second Amendment, it had rejected Sen. Roger Sherman’s proposal to impose a similar limit on the federal right to arms.

As Reconstruction was ending, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld broad gun controls while still respecting core rights. But as Jim Crow spread its tentacles, Arkansas degenerated into near-nullification of the right.

The 1876 decision Fife v. state held that a ban on open or concealed carry of pistols was too broad. Citing the Tennessee case Andrews v. State, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that only militia-type arms were protected and that the right to carry militia arms belonged to all people, not just militiamen. The court held that “the rifle, of all descriptions, the shot gun, the musket and repeater, are such arms, and … under the Constitution, the right to keep such arms cannot be infringed or forbidden by the legislature.”

While large handguns (“repeaters”) were protected, the “pocket revolver” was not, because the pocket revolver was not “effective as a weapon of war.” The court overlooked the point that the “common defense” is enhanced by personal self-defense, because responsible gun ownership and self-defense against criminals deter crime in general, aid the police and make the public at large safer.

Consistent with the Fife case, the Arkansas court later struck down convictions for carrying concealed army pistols. (Wilson v. State and Holland v. state, both in 1878.) Wilson held that carrying handguns in the course of one’s daily activities in ordinary public places (but not in churches or polling places) was a constitutional right.

The remedy to abuse of the right was not prohibition against the innocent but punishment of the guilty: “If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege.”

But the Arkansas Legislature would not quit. The carrying of most handguns was already outlawed. Then in 1881 the legislature copied the Tennessee law and banned “the carrying of army pistols except uncovered and in the hand.”

The next year, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the “in the hand” requirement in Haile v. State. Ignoring the court’s own precedents, and relying on the “common defense” language in the state constitution, the court said that the right to arms was not for personal defense, but solely for the resistance of tyranny.

The court acknowledged that the purpose of the “in the hand” law was to discourage gun carrying. Such discouragement was for the benefit of “timid citizens.” (Some today call a person with an extreme fear of guns, such that the fear interferes with normal daily activities, a “hoplophobe.”)

In essence, the court had now agreed with the legislature that the right to bear arms was a bad idea. Rather than force the legislature to seek a constitutional amendment to repeal the right, the court accepted the legislature’s practical nullification of the right to bear arms by requiring that bearing be done in the most inconvenient and dangerous manner possible.

Another 1881 statute prohibited the sale of any pistol other than those “used in the army or navy of the United States and known as the navy pistol.” The Arkansas court upheld the ban in Dabbs v. State(1882).

Oklahoma

At the 1907 Oklahoma constitutional convention, the delegates rejected a proposal to include “common defense” language in the constitutional protection of firearm possession. Instead, the delegates copied nearly verbatim from the Missouri and Colorado constitutions, explicitly protecting “defense of home, person and property” in the right to arms.

The following year, however, the Oklahoma Supreme Court in Ex parte Thomas declared that the right was only for militia-type arms, and that a “pistol” was not within the right to arms. Despite what the Thomas court claimed, there was not a single precedent for the proposition that all handguns could be banned. The Thomas court ignored the Missouri Supreme Court’s precedent that revolvers in general (not just the Army and Navy models) were protected by the state right to arms (State v. Shelby, 1886).

The Oklahoma Supreme Court strangled the state constitution’s right to arms shortly after birth. The outrageous Thomas opinion remains the leading precedent in Oklahoma, and thus for more than a century has deprived the people of Oklahoma of the protection of the strong Right to Keep and Bear Arms that they wrote into their constitution. Fortunately, as of 2011, the Oklahoma Legislature has reformed most of the bad gun laws from the Jim Crow era, but the people of Oklahoma suffered decades of deprivations of their rights—including the Right to Carry—before the legislature finally acted.

Texas

Most people would be surprised to learn that Arkansas and Tennessee were the gun-ban capitals of the United States during Jim Crow, and that Oklahoma was not far behind. People would likewise be surprised that, by the early 20th century, Texas had joined the trend.

The Texas Legislature imposed a 50 percent gross receipts tax on the sale of handguns. An intermediate court of appeals upheld the punitive tax (Caswell & Smith v. State, Tex. Civil App., 1912). The court reasoned that handguns, like alcohol, are socially harmful and therefore may be taxed severely. The court added in dicta that prohibiting the sale of handguns would not violate the state constitution.

Georgia

In 1910, the Georgia Legislature enacted a licensing requirement for the open carry of handguns. The 1910 law was not like the licensing laws in effect today in Georgia and most other states—the modern laws use objective criteria to grant carry permits to adults who meet certain specific standards, such as passing a fingerprint-based background check and a safety course. In contrast, the 1910 Georgia statute provided almost limitless discretion to the licensing authority so that, in effect, political cronies could get licenses and others (especially blacks) could not. Because the legislature had previously outlawed concealed carry, obtaining an open carry license became the only way for a person to lawfully exercise the Right to Carry a handgun.

In Strickland v. State(1911) the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the licensing statute. Admitting that the Georgia right was not limited to “common defense,” the court said that the carry ban was authorized by the general “police power” of the state—that is, the power to make laws for health, safety, welfare and morals. Yet the very purpose of enumerating rights in a constitution is to limit the police power of the state on certain subjects.

Throughout the 20th century, many courts in other states used Georgia’s “police power” rationale to uphold a wide range of anti-gun laws, thus turning those states’ constitutional right to arms into a practical nullity.

Florida

In 1893 the Florida Legislature adopted a gun control law—that it revised in 1901 and 1906—that prohibited the carrying of handguns and repeating rifles, openly or concealed, with ex­ceptions for peace officers and persons licensed by a county commissioner.

A 1941 opinion by Florida Supreme Court Justice Rivers Buford provided a frank explanation of why the carry ban was enacted and how it had actually been enforced:

“I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of Negro laborers in this state drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the act was amended in 1901 and the act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. We have no statistics avail­able, but it is a safe guess that more than 80 percent of the white men living in rural sections of Florida have violated this statute. It is also a safe guess to say that not more than 5 percent of the men in Florida who own pistols and repeating rifles have ever applied to the Board of County Commissioners for a permit to have the same in their possession and there has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested” (Watson v. State, concurring opinion).

Justice Buford pulls back the curtain on the racist gun control statutes and cases discussed here. The statutes never used the word “negro” and the cases upholding those statutes scrupulously avoided any racial language. Yet the purpose and application of those laws was well known.

New York

By the turn of the century, Jim Crow was spreading beyond its Southern roots. An 1897 New York statute outlawed the possession of a “slungshot, billy, sand club or metal knuckles”—even if nefarious intent was absent. The New York Court of Appeals upheld the ban in 1912 (People v. Persce). The court ignored the fact that the first three of the banned items, at least, have legitimate protective uses, as shown by the fact that police officers often carried them.

The next year, New York’s intermediate court of appeals, in a 3-2 vote, upheld the infamous 1911 Sullivan Act. That law required a license to possess a handgun in the home, and made the licensing process difficult and highly arbitrary. The act was upheld in spite of the existence of the New York Civil Rights Law, which includes a verbatim copy of the Second Amendment (People ex rel. Darling v. Warden of City Prison). Though unstated, the Sullivan Act targeted blacks as well as Italian and Jewish immigrants.

Ohio

Similarly, in 1920 the Ohio Supreme Court brushed aside the Ohio Constitution in State v. Nieto to uphold the conviction of a Mexican employee of an Ohio railroad who possessed a concealed handgun in violation of an absolute ban (with no licensing provision) on concealed carry.

In dissent, Justice J. Wanamaker’s dissent discussed the racial issue that underlies much of gun control history in the United States. He wrote:

“I desire to give some special attention to some of the authorities cited, supreme court decisions from Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and one or two inferior court decisions from New York, which are given in support of the doctrines upheld by this court. The Southern states have very largely furnished the precedents. It is only necessary to observe that the race issue there has extremely intensified a decisive purpose to entirely disarm the Negro, and this policy is evident upon reading the opinions.”

The majority decisions in Nieto, Darling, Thomas and many of the other cases discussed above provided the foundation for state courts nullifying the right to arms in state constitutions. These cases are still cited extensively by the gun prohibition lobbies and their judicial allies.

These cases are the product of one of the most shameful periods in American judicial history, when judges put aside the constitutions they had sworn to uphold and instead made themselves into tools of white supremacy and Jim Crow.

The battle against Jim Crow has been going on for well over a century, and it will not be completed until the Jim Crow gun control cases are recognized for the constitutional abominations that they are, and are placed on the ash heap of history, along with Plessey v. Ferguson and the rest of their ilk.



This article is based on Dave Kopel’s and Clayton Cramer’s“State Court Standards of Review for the Right to Arms,” Santa Clara Law Review (Vol. 50, 2010), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1542544.
 


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 The Racist Roots of Gun Control
 


Copyright 1993 Clayton E. Cramer All Rights Reserved. Electronic redistribution is permitted as long as no alterations are made to the text and this notice appears at the beginning. Print reproduction or for profit use is not authorized without permission from the author.



By Clayton E. Cramer
 The historical record provides compelling evidence that racism underlies gun control laws -- and not in any subtle way. Throughout much of American history, gun control was openly stated as a method for keeping blacks and Hispanics "in their place," and to quiet the racial fears of whites. This paper is intended to provide a brief summary of this unholy alliance of gun control and racism, and to suggest that gun control laws should be regarded as "suspect ideas," analogous to the "suspect classifications" theory of discrimination already part of the American legal system.

Racist arms laws predate the establishment of the United States. Starting in 1751, the French Black Code required Louisiana colonists to stop any blacks, and if necessary, beat "any black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane." If a black refused to stop on demand, and was on horseback, the colonist was authorized to "shoot to kill." [1] Slave possession of firearms was a necessity at times in a frontier society, yet laws continued to be passed in an attempt to prohibit slaves or free blacks from possessing firearms, except under very restrictively controlled conditions. [2] Similarly, in the sixteenth century the colony of New Spain, terrified of black slave revolts, prohibited all blacks, free and slave, from carrying arms. [3]

In the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, the slave population successfully threw off their French masters, but the Revolution degenerated into a race war, aggravating existing fears in the French Louisiana colony, and among whites in the slave states of the United States. When the first U. S. official arrived in New Orleans in 1803 to take charge of this new American possession, the planters sought to have the existing free black militia disarmed, and otherwise exclude "free blacks from positions in which they were required to bear arms," including such non-military functions as slave-catching crews. The New Orleans city government also stopped whites from teaching fencing to free blacks, and then, when free blacks sought to teach fencing, similarly prohibited their efforts as well. [4]

It is not surprising that the first North American English colonies, then the states of the new republic, remained in dread fear of armed blacks, for slave revolts against slave owners often degenerated into less selective forms of racial warfare. The perception that free blacks were sympathetic to the plight of their enslaved brothers, and the dangerous example that "a Negro could be free" also caused the slave states to pass laws designed to disarm all blacks, both slave and free. Unlike the gun control laws passed after the Civil War, these antebellum statutes were for blacks alone. In Maryland, these prohibitions went so far as to prohibit free blacks from owning dogs without a license, and authorizing any white to kill an unlicensed dog owned by a free black, for fear that blacks would use dogs as weapons. Mississippi went further, and prohibited any ownership of a dog by a black person. [5]

Understandably, restrictions on slave possession of arms go back a very long way. While arms restrictions on free blacks predate it, these restrictions increased dramatically after Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, a revolt that caused the South to become increasingly irrational in its fears. [6] Virginia's response to Turner's Rebellion prohibited free blacks "to keep or carry any firelock of any kind, any military weapon, or any powder or lead..." The existing laws under which free blacks were occasionally licensed to possess or carry arms was also repealed, making arms possession completely illegal for free blacks. [7] But even before this action by the Virginia Legislature, in the aftermath of Turner's Rebellion, the discovery that a free black family possessed lead shot for use as scale weights, without powder or weapon in which to fire it, was considered sufficient reason for a frenzied mob to discuss summary execution of the owner. [8] The analogy to the current hysteria where mere possession of ammunition in some states without a firearms license may lead to jail time, should be obvious.

One example of the increasing fear of armed blacks is the 1834 change to the Tennessee Constitution, where Article XI, 26 of the 1796 Tennessee Constitution was revised from: "That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence," [9] to: "That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence." [10] [emphasis added] It is not clear what motivated this change, other than Turner's bloody insurrection. The year before, the Tennessee Supreme Court had recognized the right to bear arms as an individual guarantee, but there is nothing in that decision that touches on the subject of race. [11]

Other decisions during the antebellum period were unambiguous about the importance of race. In State v. Huntly (1843), the North Carolina Supreme Court had recognized that there was a right to carry arms guaranteed under the North Carolina Constitution, as long as such arms were carried in a manner not likely to frighten people. [12] The following year, the North Carolina Supreme Court made one of those decisions whose full significance would not appear until after the Civil War and passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. An 1840 statute provided:

That if any free negro, mulatto, or free person of color, shall wear or carry about his or her person, or keep in his or her house, any shot gun, musket, rifle, pistol, sword, dagger or bowie-knife, unless he or she shall have obtained a licence therefor from the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions of his or her county, within one year preceding the wearing, keeping or carrying therefor, he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and may be indicted therefor. [13]

Elijah Newsom, "a free person of color," was indicted in Cumberland County in June of 1843 for carrying a shotgun without a license -- at the very time the North Carolina Supreme Court was deciding Huntly. Newsom was convicted by a jury; but the trial judge directed a not guilty verdict, and the state appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Newsom's attorney argued that the statute requiring free blacks to obtain a license to "keep and bear arms" was in violation of both the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and the North Carolina Constitution's similar guarantee of a right to keep and bear arms. [14] The North Carolina Supreme Court refused to accept that the Second Amendment was a limitation on state laws, but had to deal with the problem of the state constitutional guarantees, which had been used in the Huntly decision, the year before.

The 17th article of the 1776 North Carolina Constitution declared:

That the people have a right to bear arms, for the defence of the State; and, as standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power. [15]

The Court asserted that: "We cannot see that the act of 1840 is in conflict with it... The defendant is not indicted for carrying arms in defence of the State, nor does the act of 1840 prohibit him from so doing." [16] But in Huntly, the Court had acknowledged that the restrictive language "for the defence of the State" did not preclude an individual right. [17] The Court then attempted to justify the necessity of this law:

Its only object is to preserve the peace and safety of the community from being disturbed by an indiscriminate use, on ordinary occasions, by free men of color, of fire arms or other arms of an offensive character. Self preservation is the first law of nations, as it is of individuals. [18]

The North Carolina Supreme Court also sought to repudiate the idea that free blacks were protected by the North Carolina Constitution's Bill of Rights by pointing out that the Constitution excluded free blacks from voting, and therefore free blacks were not citizens. Unlike a number of other state constitutions with right to keep and bear arms provisions that limited this right only to citizens, [19] Article 17 guaranteed this right to the people -- and try as hard as they might, it was difficult to argue that a "free person of color," in the words of the Court, was not one of "the people."

It is one of the great ironies that, in much the same way that the North Carolina Supreme Court recognized a right to bear arms in 1843 -- then a year later declared that free blacks were not included -- the Georgia Supreme Court did likewise before the 1840s were out. The Georgia Supreme Court found in Nunn v. State (1846) that a statute prohibiting the sale of concealable handguns, sword-canes, and daggers violated the Second Amendment:

The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all of this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, reestablished by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta! And Lexington, Concord, Camden, River Raisin, Sandusky, and the laurel-crowned field of New Orleans, plead eloquently for this interpretation! [20]

Finally, after this paean to liberty -- in a state where much of the population remained enslaved, forbidden by law to possess arms of any sort -- the Court defined the valid limits of laws restricting the bearing of arms:

We are of the opinion, then, that so far as the act of 1837 seeks to suppress the practice of carrying certain weapons secretly, that it is valid, inasmuch as it does not deprive the citizen of his natural right of self- defence, or of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But that so much of it, as contains a prohibition against bearing arms openly, is in conflict with the Constitution, and void... [21]

"Citizen"? Within a single page, the Court had gone from "right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys" to the much more narrowly restrictive right of a "citizen." The motivation for this sudden narrowing of the right appeared two years later.

The decision Cooper and Worsham v. Savannah (1848) was not, principally, a right to keep and bear arms case. In 1839, the city of Savannah, Georgia, in an admitted effort "to prevent the increase of free persons of color in our city," had established a $100 per year tax on free blacks moving into Savannah from other parts of Georgia. Samuel Cooper and Hamilton Worsham, two "free persons of color," were convicted of failing to pay the tax, and were jailed. [22] On appeal, counsel for Cooper and Worsham argued that the ordinance establishing the tax was deficient in a number of technical areas; the assertion of most interest to us is, "In Georgia, free persons of color have constitutional rights..." Cooper and Worsham's counsel argued that these rights included writ of habeas corpus, right to own real estate, to be "subject to taxation," "[t]hey may sue and be sued," and cited a number of precedents under Georgia law in defense of their position. [23]

Justice Warner delivered the Court's opinion, most of which is irrelevant to the right to keep and bear arms, but one portion shows the fundamental relationship between citizenship, arms, and elections, and why gun control laws were an essential part of defining blacks as "non-citizens": "Free persons of color have never been recognized here as citizens; they are not entitled to bear arms, vote for members of the legislature, or to hold any civil office." [24] The Georgia Supreme Court did agree that the ordinance jailing Cooper and Worsham for non-payment was illegal, and ordered their release, but the comments of the Court made it clear that their brave words in Nunn v. State (1846) about "the right of the people," really only meant white people.

While settled parts of the South were in great fear of armed blacks, on the frontier, the concerns about Indian attack often forced relaxation of these rules. The 1798 Kentucky Comprehensive Act allowed slaves and free blacks on frontier plantations "to keep and use guns, powder, shot, and weapons, offensive and defensive." Unlike whites, however, a license was required for free blacks or slaves to carry weapons. [25]

The need for blacks to carry arms for self-defense included not only the problem of Indian attack, and the normal criminal attacks that anyone might worry about, but he additional hazard that free blacks were in danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. [26] A number of states, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, passed laws specifically to prohibit kidnapping of free blacks, out of concern that the federal Fugitive Slave Laws would be used as cover for re-enslavement. [27]

The end of slavery in 1865 did not eliminate the problems of racist gun control laws; the various Black Codes adopted after the Civil War required blacks to obtain a license before carrying or possessing firearms or Bowie knives; these are sufficiently well-known that any reasonably complete history of the Reconstruction period mentions them. These restrictive gun laws played a part in the efforts of the Republicans to get the Fourteenth Amendment ratified, because it was difficult for night riders to generate the correct level of terror in a victim who was returning fire. [28] It does appear, however, that the requirement to treat blacks and whites equally before the law led to the adoption of restrictive firearms laws in the South that were equal in the letter of the law, but unequally enforced. It is clear that the vagrancy statutes adopted at roughly the same time, in 1866, were intended to be used against blacks, even though the language was race-neutral. [29]

The former states of the Confederacy, many of which had recognized the right to carry arms openly before the Civil War, developed a very sudden willingness to qualify that right. One especially absurd example, and one that includes strong evidence of the racist intentions behind gun control laws, is Texas.

In Cockrum v. State (1859), the Texas Supreme Court had recognized that there was a right to carry defensive arms, and that this right was protected under both the Second Amendment, and section 13 of the Texas Bill of Rights. The outer limit of the state's authority (in this case, attempting to discourage the carrying of Bowie knives), was that it could provide an enhanced penalty for manslaughters committed with Bowie knives. [30] Yet, by 1872, the Texas Supreme Court denied that there was any right to carry any weapon for self-defense under either the state or federal constitutions -- and made no attempt to explain or justify why the Cockrum decision was no longer valid. [31]

What caused the dramatic change? The following excerpt from that same decision -- so offensive that no one would dare make such an argument today -- sheds some light on the racism that apparently caused the sudden perspective change:

The law under consideration has been attacked upon the ground that it was contrary to public policy, and deprived the people of the necessary means of self- defense; that it was an innovation upon the customs and habits of the people, to which they would not peaceably submit... We will not say to what extent the early customs and habits of the people of this state should be respected and accommodated, where they may come in conflict with the ideas of intelligent and well-meaning legislators. A portion of our system of laws, as well as our public morality, is derived from a people the most peculiar perhaps of any other in the history and derivation of its own system. Spain, at different periods of the world, was dominated over by the Carthagenians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Snovi, the Allani, the Visigoths, and Arabs; and to this day there are found in the Spanish codes traces of the laws and customs of each of these nations blended together in a system by no means to be compared with the sound philosophy and pure morality of the common law. [32] [emphasis added]

This particular decision is more open than most as to its motivations, but throughout the South during this period, the existing precedents that recognized a right to open carry under state constitutional provisions were being narrowed, or simply ignored. Nor was the reasoning that led to these changes lost on judges in the North. In 1920, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Mexican for concealed carry of a handgun--while asleep in his own bed. Justice Wanamaker's scathing dissent criticized the precedents cited by the majority in defense of this absurdity:

I desire to give some special attention to some of the authorities cited, supreme court decisions from Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and one or two inferior court decisions from New York, which are given in support of the doctrines upheld by this court. The southern states have very largely furnished the precedents. It is only necessary to observe that the race issue there has extremely intensified a decisive purpose to entirely disarm the negro, and this policy is evident upon reading the opinions. [33]

While not relevant to the issue of racism, Justice Wanamaker's closing paragraphs capture well the biting wit and intelligence of this jurist, who was unfortunately, outnumbered on the bench:

I hold that the laws of the state of Ohio should be so applied and so interpreted as to favor the law-abiding rather than the law-violating people. If this decision shall stand as the law of Ohio, a very large percentage of the good people of Ohio to-day are criminals, because they are daily committing criminal acts by having these weapons in their own homes for their own defense. The only safe course for them to pursue, instead of having the weapon concealed on or about their person, or under their pillow at night, is to hang the revolver on the wall and put below it a large placard with these words inscribed:

"The Ohio supreme court having decided that it is a crime to carry a concealed weapon on one's person in one's home, even in one's bed or bunk, this weapon is hung upon the wall that you may see it, and before you commit any burglary or assault, please, Mr. Burglar, hand me my gun." [34]

There are other examples of remarkable honesty from the state supreme courts on this subject, of which the finest is probably Florida Supreme Court Justice Buford's concurring opinion in Watson v. Stone (1941), in which a conviction for carrying a handgun without a permit was overturned, because the handgun was in the glove compartment of a car:

I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. [35]

Today is not 1893, and when proponents of restrictive gun control insist that their motivations are color-blind, there is a possibility that they are telling the truth. Nonetheless, there are some rather interesting questions that should be asked today. The most obvious question is, "Why should a police chief or sheriff have any discretion in issuing a concealed handgun permit?" Here in California, even the state legislature's research arm--hardly a nest of pro-gunners--has admitted that the vast majority of permits to carry concealed handguns in California are issued to white males. [36] Even if overt racism is not an issue, an official may simply have more empathy with an applicant of a similar cultural background, and consequently be more able to relate to the applicant's concerns. As my wife pointedly reminded a police official when we applied for concealed weapon permits, "If more police chiefs were women, a lot more women would get permits, and be able to defend themselves from rapists."

Gun control advocates today are not so foolish as to openly promote racist laws, and so the question might be asked what relevance the racist past of gun control laws has. One concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the official rhetoric in support of such laws was that "they" were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government. In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery.

In the seventeenth century, the aristocratic power structure of colonial Virginia found itself confronting a similar challenge from lower class whites. These poor whites resented how the men who controlled the government used that power to concentrate wealth into a small number of hands. These wealthy feeders at the government trough would have disarmed poor whites if they could, but the threat of both Indian and pirate attack made this impractical; for all white men "were armed and had to be armed..." Instead, blacks, who had occupied a poorly defined status between indentured servant and slave, were reduced to hereditary chattel slavery, so that poor whites could be economically advantaged, without the upper class having to give up its privileges. [37]

Today, the forces that push for gun control seem to be heavily (though not exclusively) allied with political factions that are committed to dramatic increases in taxation on the middle class. While it would be hyperbole to compare higher taxes on the middle class to the suffering and deprivation of sharecropping or slavery, the analogy of disarming those whom you wish to economically disadvantage, has a certain worrisome validity to it.

Another point to consider is that in the American legal system, certain classifications of governmental discrimination are considered constitutionally suspect, and these "suspect classifications" (usually considered to be race and religion) come to a court hearing under a strong presumption of invalidity. The reason for these "suspect classifications" is because of the long history of governmental discrimination based on these classifications, and because these classifications often impinge on fundamental rights. [38]

In much the same way, gun control has historically been a tool of racism, and associated with racist attitudes about black violence. Similarly, many gun control laws impinge on that most fundamental of rights: self-defense. Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should regard gun control aimed at law-abiding people as a "suspect idea," and require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race.
 
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NOTES:

1. Thomas N. Ingersoll, "Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812", _William and Marry Quarterly_, 48:2 [April, 1991], 178-79.

2. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., _Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783_, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 139, 165, 187.

3. Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, _The Course of Mexican History_, 4th ed., (New York, Oxford University Press: 1991), 216.

4. Ingersoll, 192-200. Benjamin Quarles, _The Negro in the Making of America_, 3rd ed., (New York, Macmillan Publishing: 1987), 81.

5. Theodore Brantner Wilson, _The Black Codes of the South_ (University of Alabama Press: 1965), 26-30.

6. Stanley Elkins, _Slavery_, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1968), 220.

7. Eric Foner, ed., _Nat Turner_, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall: 1971), 115.

8. Harriet Jacobs [Linda Brant], _Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl_, (Boston: 1861), in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., _The Classic Slave Narratives_, (New York, Penguin Books: 1987), 395-396.

9. Francis Newton Thorpe, _The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming The United States of America_, (Washington, Government Printing Office: 1909), reprinted (Grosse Pointe, Mich., Scholarly Press: n.d.), 6:3424.

10. Thorpe, 6:3428.

11. Simpson v. State, 5 Yerg. 356 (Tenn. 1833).

12. State v. Huntly, 3 Iredell 418, 422, 423 (N.C. 1843).

13. State v. Newsom, 5 Iredell 181, 27 N.C. 250 (1844).

14. State v. Newsom, 5 Iredell 181, 27 N.C. 250, 251 (1844).

15. Thorpe, 5:2788.

16. State v. Newsom, 5 Iredell 181, 27 N.C. 250, 254 (1844).

17. State v. Huntly, 3 Iredell 418, 422 (N.C. 1843).

18. State v. Newsom, 5 Iredell 181, 27 N.C. 250, 254 (1844).

19. Early state constitutions limiting the right to bear arms to citizens: Connecticut (1818), Kentucky (1792 & 1799), Maine (1819), Mississippi (1817), Pennsylvania (1790 -- but not the 1776 constitution), Republic of Texas (1838), State of Texas (1845).

20. Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243, 250, 251 (1846).

21. Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243, 250, 251 (1846).

22. Cooper and Worsham v. Savannah, 4 Ga. 68, 69 (1848).

23. Cooper and Worsham v. Savannah, 4 Ga. 68, 70, 71 (1848).

24. Cooper and Worsham v. Savannah, 4 Ga. 68, 72 (1848).

25. Juliet E. K. Walker, _Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier_, (Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky: 1983), 21. This is an inspiring biography of a slave who, through hard work moonlighting in the production of saltpeter (a basic ingredient of black powder) and land surveying, saved enough money to buy his wife, himself, and eventually all of his children and grandchildren out of slavery -- while fighting against oppressive laws and vigorous racism. Most impressive of all, is that he did it without ever learning to read or write.

26. Walker, 73.

27. Stephen Middleton, _The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History_, (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press: 1993), 27-32, 227-240, 309-314, 353-357, 403-404.

28. Michael Les Benedict, _The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives to Restoring the Union_, 1865-1877, (New York, J.B. Lippincott Co.: 1975), 87. Francis L. Broderick, _Reconstruction and the American Negro, 1865-1900_, (London, Macmillan Co.: 1969), 21. Dan T. Carter, _When The War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865- 1867_, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press: 1985), 219-221. Eric Foner, _Reconstruction_, (New York, Harper & Row: 1988), 258-259.

29. Foner, _Reconstruction_, 200-201.

30. Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394, 401, 402, 403 (1859).

31. English v. State, 35 Tex. 473, 475 (1872).

32. English v. State, 35 Tex. 473, 479, 480 (1872).

33. State v. Nieto, 101 Ohio St. 409, 430, 130 N.E. 663 (1920).

34. State v. Nieto, 101 Ohio St. 409, 436, 130 N.E. 663 (1920).

35. Watson v. Stone, 4 So.2d 700, 703 (Fla. 1941).

36. Assembly Office of Research, _Smoking Gun: The Case For Concealed Weapon Permit Reform_, (Sacramento, State of California: 1986), 5.

37. Edmund S. Morgan, "Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox," in Stanley N. Katz, John M. Murrin, and Douglas Greenberg, ed., _Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development_, 4th ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc, 1993), 280.

38. Thomas G. Walker, "Suspect Classifications", _Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States_, (New York, Oxford University Press: 1992), 848.
 
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