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Notes -
AP News reports:
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
prosecutionpersecution. 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.
"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.
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