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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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AP News reports:

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.

The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.

Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said.

The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.

I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.

There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.

The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.

Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.

They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!

Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution persecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.

We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.

We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.

Fucking hell. I can only hope you’re wrong.

On one hand, we are getting the enforcement split that should be expected for this issue. I do think that’s some evidence against the strong form of the deep state, where anyone who takes government dollars is on board with a particular brand of authoritarian neoliberalism.

On the other…I’m not seeing any evidence that the courts or pundits or general voting public are giving Grisham the thrashing she deserves. There’s some intraparty squabbling, but it’s laughable—directly proportional to their distance from the actual law. Talk is cheap, and tweets are cheaper. So your central thesis is holding up depressingly well.

To be fair, the New Mexico Attorney General says he will not defend the law in court, which is a bigger surprise to me. I don't think it'll turn tomorrow hearing into an effective ex parte one unless Grisham decides against sending anyone, but it's not something he had to do, either.

So this is going to get injuncted. Until the injunction happens, there will be some open carry protestors- either local yokels or three percenters- taking over some minor public place in Albuquerque. These people will get away with it, the New Mexico state government will see the NRA crowd take over the square in front of their capital building some time in the next year but otherwise come away unharmed, and the lesson everyone takes will be "violating firearms laws is OK".

... so, there's a funny thing that happened today:

Handguns, assault rifles and even a few muskets were fully on display on Sunday in Old Town Albuquerque by about 150 or so people defying the recent New Mexico public health order issued late Friday by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham banning the carrying of firearms in public spaces.

What wasn’t obvious, was an attempt at enforcement. Police were not present, save for an Albuquerque Police Department surveillance device parked at the corner of Old Town Plaza that is often there during weekend events. It’s unclear if any plain clothes officers were in attendance. No police in uniforms were seen throughout the event.

Even without that physical presence, the governor’s office intends to act.

“The order is being enforced, and citations will be forthcoming from the State Police,” said Caroline Sweeny, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham’s office. ”To ensure officer safety, we will not be providing additional details at this time.”

I don't expect this will stick -- if actually sent, and not sent pretextually, if anything this makes the standing argument easier -- but at this point I could see something stupid like arbitrarily pulling CHL permits without stating the cause.

Separately, there was a hearing scheduling on one court case for a temporary restraining order for early on 9/12; it has since been canceled. Presumably it or another companion will be rescheduled at some point.

I'm all for gun control, but this is just lawless. Trying to pretend that bullets are a disease is nonsense. Using that as a justification to unilaterally take away a constitutional right, without any sort of legislative fig leaf? It's absolute garbage.

If you don't like the second amendment, repeal it. If you can't repeal it, abide by it. It's that simple.

This will obviously get slapped down by the first court it encounters, but there really ought to be some sort of penalty for this kind of blatant abuse of power. I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.

I am genuinely glad to see you post this.

I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.

Unfortunately, most of them find the same problem. New Mexico's abuses of emergency health orders during COVID weren't as severe as California or Michigan, but they were still pretty severe, and legislative attempts to limit them stalled in committee on a party-line vote. The legislature does not even convene until January 16th (for 30 days on even-numbered years), so unless this order is extended for nearly four months it would take a special session to even start any legislative response, which can only be convened by a 2/3rd majority. And Grishman can veto or pocket veto legislation, which again requires a 2/3rds majority to pass.

The New Mexico GOP has claimed to pursue a federal lawsuit, though I'm skeptical that they'd have any better standing or argument than the individual cases. There's... not much hope of a state lawsuit going anywhere.

It's too bad NM doesn't seem to have criminal penalties for violation of oath like Georgia.

Also relevant to point out that CHL license holders are filtered for higher levels of law abidingness than the general population, and if the goal is to make gun owners trust gun control, it is almost exactly the wrong approach to make policy which primarily impacts them.

if the goal is to make gun owners trust gun control, it is almost exactly the wrong approach to make policy which primarily impacts them.

And this is obvious to anyone, including skilled politicians like the New Mexico governor. Therefore, that is not the goal.

If you don't like the second amendment, repeal it. If you can't repeal it, abide by it. It's that simple.

Thats outdated point of view, the constitution is something to be ignored, worked around or at best something to be read as we say in my country - the way the devil reads the bible. And also courts are allowed to write their own fan fiction on the original material.

To explain in game of throne terms - after the 60s we are living in the constitutional season 8. Probably split 2/1 about it written by democratic leaning SCOTUS.

Sometimes I dream about the Marshall of the Supreme Court going to the house of the NY governor and jailing them for contempt of court for passing the same bullshit gun restriction that has been slapped down a dozen times with minor alterations. Would certainly enact the spirit of the law if not it's letter. Then I remember that would only escalate the situation and probably trigger court packing.

But if officials are going to have such blatant disregard for the law of the land, maybe escalation is all that's left.

That's the beauty of it, with leftist control of the justice system, they can just do this in thirty day chunks and by the time any judge ever hears it, it will be "moot" because that particular policy ended and a new thirty day one just started.

There are of course exceptions to mootness for recurring policies.

I'm sure there's an emanation from someone's penumbra that creates an exception to anything that's unpopular in law schools.

There are of course exceptions to mootness for recurring policies.

Indeed, but entirely up to judicial discretion. Which means whether they are applied or not will be decided by other criteria.

Could this work by "all law-abiding citizens no longer carry, only the criminals, so now if someone is stopped and found to have a gun, the book gets thrown at them NO EXCUSES so for once we can keep Denzil The Drug Dealer in jail for longer than ten minutes"?

I don't see any serious approach where it could. There's already a lot of normally law-abiding citizens who are going to go far out of their way to break this particular order, and the order was issued with far too little notice for law-abiding normies to obey it if they wanted. And the punishments are trivial compared to traditional criminal law.

Perhaps more damning, I'm not sure why anyone would issue this order for that purpose, as opposed to simply directing her branch of the government to do it directly. There's some fun constitutional questions for whether drug users or sellers can possess firearms legally, but they're less constitutionally dubious than this. And the simple bit of "actually just go after drug dealers and violent criminals" is right there waiting for someone to pick it up.

There's a (very limited) steelman where this becomes a police tool, as a fig leaf for a broader stop-and-frisk; even if no one's ever prosecuted for breaking the order, it gives a lot of space for police to do random searches for weapons (and thus drugs and contraband and fleeing-from-police and not having a license for a gun and not having a gun that's not the one listed on your CHL and whatever). But even that doesn't really do a great job of actually focusing police power on violent criminals; it's one of the major flaws with actual stop-and-frisk. And it of course only augments the constitutional issues.

No, fails the disparate impact test.

No, no it can't.

Which means Denzel just hires local youths to be his security. Drug dealers have been splitting up roles for decades to make prosecution harder.

I will make a further prediction: At least one person will be arrested and charged with violating this order. Like the tiki torch marchers, they will not get their day in court; they may not be convicted of violating the order but they will be effectively coerced into pleading guilty to something and having their firearms and firearms rights taken for them.

I predict that this emergency order works as intended: if you look like an upstanding citizen you can CC and no one will care. If you look like a felon, this now gives the police a great pretext to stop you, leading to your likely arrest for other infractions.

That is, unless an unlikely bipartisan coalition tries to force the government hand: upstanding citizens that look like upstanding citizens and defiantly OC because constitution, and upstanding citizens that look like felons and want profiling to stop.

It's New Mexico. It's solid democrat but there's actual hardcore red tribers in much more significant numbers, and much more urban and periurban environments, than in say New York or California, and lots of libertarians running around. Open carry protestors will take over some minor local landmark(maybe a farmer's market or a park) and the cops(at least the locals) will let them. That's just going to happen.

Usually, at least at the prosecutor's level, if not the actual beat officers, this seems to work the opposite way. If you're an upstanding citizen CCing in full compliance with the actual published law, then you get the book thrown at you - full charges, highest bail they can get, max punishment, etc. If you're a career criminal on the way to commit another armed robbery or gang hit, then you get charges dropped lightened to where you can be released immediately.

This law doesn’t prohibit CC though.

Actually it does

become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution.

* persecution?

Technically both, since she claimed the persecution was in the form of prosecutions, but yeah, that's more correct. Thanks.

"Civil Rights" is a wholly-owned trademark of Blue Tribe, and as such nothing Blue Tribe does can be recognized by them as a civil rights violation. The right to keep and bear arms obviously is not a real civil right, and neither is the right to practice Christianity; such activities are simply too harmful to society, and of course things people want must be balanced against the interests of the public, as understood by Blue Tribe. They will never stop violating these rights, because they fundamentally do not and cannot recognize them as rights. If they have power, this is how they will use it.

[EDIT] ...And of course nothing in the above is exclusive to Blue Tribe. Rights are, in fact, a spook. The vast majority of people will never respect them as anything more than a means to an end, and ends differ between tribes. As our values continue to diverge, the "Civil Rights" framework becomes increasingly unworkable.

It's helpful to note the ways in which consensus is formed. You wrote this up yourself, pulling together a dozen or so articles to attempt to generate context. When it goes the other way, that job is done by a professional class who are paid to do it and outnumber you, roughly speaking, 9 to 1. That means they can generate at least nine times as much context as you do, and even if that "context" is absolute garbage, it's still inescapably dominant. Naively, people look at that information and drift naturally to the easy conclusion, that the truth generally lies with the majority. This naïve base impression persists even in relatively sophisticated environments like this one; we triangulate based on our data, so controlling the data means controlling us, even here. The only possible response as an individual is epistemic closure: to refuse to update based on discredited sources. Not doing this means allowing yourself to have your dataset irreparably corrupted. Doing this means foreclosing any ability to conduct constructive object-level dialog with the outgroup.

I think that the "civil rights" approach degenerated decades ago. When I was thinking about it, the right is now basically whatever value you want to push, it is an excerpt of your holy book you want to impose on other people. I had this discussion about the program of leftist party in my country and I was called a bigot for opposing some trans related points in the program. Of course, because these are rights and we do not discuss them, rights are outside of political purview, you see?. Of course we also have climate rights, we have right to free shelter and healthcare including proposals for right to oral care. In such a case you are basically supposed to live in blue tribe version of sharia law, the only thing that is to be part of the political process is meaningless issues - such as if tax should be X or X+1 percent. The rest is not subject of discussion, it is all spoils for winners of culture war. Everything is political indeed, and at the same time nothing is.

Similarly to OP, I realize that this post is quite antagonistic in a sense, but I do not see any other way. I consciously decided to vote on culture war issues exactly for OPs reasons. I think that voting based on policies is becoming stupid in this polarized society. Otherwise you will exactly end up in situation that OP describes, an anarchotyranny where one side views your values as illegitimate and that is capable and willing to do anything to suppress them. It is fundamental clash of aesthetics above substance. In my political discussions I have better results pointing out that incompatibility:

You think that I am transphobe for criticizing program of your favorite party? Look, I don't care. Your words ring hollow to me, I could not care less because I do not share your aesthetics. To me it is analogous as if you criticize me for being uncouth pigeater who sins against muslim aesthetics. It is a category error, I do not care about it whatsoever - in fact I laugh in your face while eating greasy pork fried in lard, downing it with huge gulps of forbidden strong beer. What are you going to do about it?

I really do not know how to get out of this pickle.

When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them. Well, here's us starting to slide down that slope. Make up any rule you want, call it a "public health order", and just maybe it will stand and actually be enforced.

I really hope this doesn't stand, because it will only accelerate us towards a regime of government executives actually ruling by decree without regard to the Constitution. And what'll happen if a Red team executive in a Red state copies the pattern, maybe doing something like closing down all gay bars and other meeting places as a "public health order" to stop Monkeypox or Aids or something.

When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them.

It wasn't a slippery slope. It already was the Government making up any orders they felt like at any time they felt like and successfully enforcing them. There's no need to make a slippery slope argument when you've already hit the jagged spikes at the bottom.

It makes me wonder what the governor’s motivations are. I don’t know anything about New Mexico politics (besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing). This seems like a totally bizarre thing to do in an off election year for a politician who can’t possibly aspire to an office outside of New Mexico. I wonder if she is trying to get ahead of a scandal or something.

Charitably, people who don't care about guns or are anti-gun to start with sometimes might have seen a recent few high-profile incidents that Hit Close To Home and suddenly justified everything. This model's kinda the dark mirror to the "conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" deal: there's a lot of people who were once willing to live-and-let-live (or at least had better places to spend their political capital) who become true believers over some incident that made things too salient for them. The resulting policy proposals aren't always this hairbrained, but you're picking from a group that's by definition not considered the space at length in the past nor been heavily exposed to other people who have. Some people are people do really believe what they're doing.

But Grisham has been in this game for a while. The more cynical analysis is that she's term-limited (New Mexico governors can only serve two terms; her second ends in 2027) in a pretty Blue and increasingly blueing state (between Californian exodus, and the aftermath of the last decade worth of redistricting), and she's been working in (otherwise unemployable parts of) the .gov since 1992. There's three major career paths available where this sorta trial balloon is a major resume-burnisher even and maybe especially if it flops: either moving to federal politics, managing state-level politics, or going into the bureaucratic activism or non-technically-state-just-state-funded activist groups.

It's possible she's gunning for Lujan's seat -- he had a stroke last year, and while he's recovered might take it as a sign to retire -- or perhaps the VP slot for 2028. But more likely I'm thinking the last option. This is the sorta thing that absolutely blocks any chance of a cabinet-level position or other place requiring a senate confirmation, short of a wildly stacked Dem Senate, but it's an excellent advertisement for Acting whatevers or bigger names at think tanks or commentary positions, where this hugely visible commitment is useful to know who's likely to stay bought.

besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing

It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.

Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.

Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).

Curious if anyone has other explanations.

New Mexico/Colorado have always been kinda libertarian in a vaguely blue way(eg drugs and weird sex stuff and not too attached to guns). New Mexico is also super duper Hispanic.

Many of the government employees are military and fairly reddish, I don't think it's government employment.

All I know is back in the 2000s, people were complaining about all the Californians moving in. And the state moved from a Red, to a Purple, to a Blue state in the time following. I don't have any actual statistics on how many Californians moved to New Mexico, I just know that was a complaint people were making.

A lot of filming started to take place in New Mexico, the Albuquerque government began courting studios.

I mean instead of checking 1 by 1 you can plot and check for correlations

Harder to do on a phone, though, and I try not to open my computer on weekends. Maybe I'll do it at work on Monday.

I think that sounds very compelling, I would also add a little to the government employment aspect (especially with respect to large # of very well compensated scientists working at sandia and Los Alamos), is substantial, but who knows, the hard sciences are usually split more evenly.

New Mexico is a very urban state.

Urban is a bit underspecified, but some statistics about the urban population:

Arizona 89.3%

Colorado 86.0%

Nevada 94.1%

New Mexico 74.5%

Texas 83.7%

Utah 89.8%

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/mapping-us-urbanization-by-state/

NM is more urbanized than AK, OK, and WY though.

Is this using a system like the census where they define urban as an arbitrary density cutoff that includes things like small farming towns that are ruby red? That kinda undermines everything people mean when they say urban.

I mean, it's kinda justifiable for the census. Their data presumably have some hand in planning things like plumbing infrastructure, but it's really not helpful for a thread on the culture war where urban tends to imply blue tribe.

At least for Texas the vast majority of the population lives in definitely urban environments in a few major metros(DFW and Houston combined have just over half the state's population, add in San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso there's a supermajority), so I think the data is directionally correct.

How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?

Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.

From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.

Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities. So it's urban in that sense, but only a tiny sliver of the geography is actually urban.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities.

Or in other words, the state is just Australia in microcosm; political implications and all.

Interesting, because Oz is perhaps surprisingly more woke and lefty despite the "pioneer spirit" which would lean very much the opposite. But, I suppose, now that the vast majority are softies in the cities, it makes sense.

Could be she’s angling for a possible Vice President nomination. Correct-thinking Latina governor in a border state? You may recall when Susana Martinez, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, was a serious VP contender for Mitt Romney, and she spoke at one of the RNC national conventions one year.

As far as the state being ‘left wing’, it really isn’t. Not in the Vermont/Bernie Sanders/Portlandia way. New Mexico has for some time been a majority-minority state. American Indians make up 11 percent of the state’s population, the third highest in the United States after Alaska and Oklahoma. The median household income in 2021 was on the level with Alabama, making it 45th out of 50 in the United States. To put it bluntly, the modal New Mexican citizen is a poor, lowly educated Hispano-Indian who correctly perceives the Democratic Party as the party of handouts. The state is about as far away from the Gray Tribe, Bay Area rationalists and the Sanders socialists as can be!

Long term I think this might be a blessing in disguise. There’s really a mask-off moment here where the government never even pretended to be making or enforcing a new law. They didn’t bother with even a decent pretext for doing this. The governor simply declared a health emergency out of not much (the murder rate isn’t as bad as most major cities) and decided that carrying is illegal.

This is a case that everyone concerned with civil liberties can and will point to probably for a long time as the point where the mask slipped and the public got to see the full on truth that the government doesn’t actually believe in rights or at least not your rights. I don’t believe in conspiracy, however the last several years seem to have been a whole series of red pills in the sense that I don’t think anyone paying attention can deny just how far from the Republic (as defined by the Constitution) we’ve actually gone.

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