Shoot ’em up, shoot ’em up, rah, rah, rah!
For some on the right, this whole “every American having access to healthcare coverage” thing is just too goddam much. I wrote yesterday about some of the instant freakout responses. Today we have another and it’s a doozy.
Former Republican Party spokesman and Lansing “civil rights” attorney Matthew Davis sent out a press release titled “Is Armed Rebellion Now Justified?”.
Is Armed Rebellion Now Justified?Implicit in Benjamin Franklin’s fabled response at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention was a dire warning: That the Republic would one day devolve into tyranny unless we the people prevented it.
In 2008, we the people elected Barack Obama as president, and the 100-year progressive trek to tyranny begun in 1912 with Woodrow Wilson’s election was complete. It cannot be said too many times — for the purposes of emphasis and clarity — that the Constitution was possible ONLY AFTER the American Revolution; and that the war itself would not have been possible without the collective agreement, as so eloquently articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that the course of human events will sometimes justify one group of people to sever themselves from their oppressors.
In other words, America itself was possible only after its people summoned the will to risk their lives and their futures — as well as those of their children — for a freedom they did not enjoy but knew was their gift from God. Along with their desire to be free came their willingness to engaged in armed rebellion for their freedom.
If government can mandate that I pay for something I don’t want, then what is beyond its power? If the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday paves the way for unprecedented intrusion into personal decisions, then has the Republic all but ceased to exist? If so, then is armed rebellion today justified?
God willing, this oppression will be lifted and America free again before the first shot is fired.
The first Democrat to respond was Lance Enderle, Democratic candidate for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District:
Reasonable Americans can disagree, vehemently, about political decisions. But when the rhetoric turns to armed rebellion and violence, it is no longer dissent. It’s yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, and it’s a crime against the United States. Inciting violence is not protected by the First Amendment. The Michigan GOP and the Mackinac Center should immediately condemn Mr. Davis for his violent, dangerous, and frankly illegal conduct.
Enderle mentions the Mackinac Center for Public Policy because they were one of the first to reprint his letter under the comically unassuming subtitle “Lansing attorney does not like Supreme Court Obamacare ruling”. Their piece suggests that they are sympathetic to Davis’ position and had no commentary regarding the outright absurdity of it.
Davis said he wasn’t calling for violence, rather he was pointing out that historically that is what has occurred at times in America. He compared armed rebellion to a situation where the government cannot get your money by way of liens or seizure of bank accounts is coming to arrest you for not paying an unconstitutional tax.“You can’t have people walking with lattes and signs and think the object of your opposition is going to take you seriously,” Davis said. “Armed rebellion is the end point of that physical confrontation.”
Right. He’s not “calling for violence”. He just prepared a press release ahead of time and, as soon as the SCOTUS decision was announced, sent it out to media outlets across the state asking, just asking mind you, if violent overthrow of the government is justified.
Republicans are now almost entirely controlled by the tea party. Some of the tea party’s most outspoken members share Davis’ worldview. They are extremist freaks that have no business having anything to do with the national conversation about how we ensure that our citizens have adequate healthcare coverage or any other debate of consequence because, if they don’t get their way, they want to use violence to seize it.
Libby Spencer put it perfectly in her Detroit News op-ed:
Armed revolt? Physical confrontation? It brings new meaning to the term “sore loser.” The Affordable Care Act was born of a legal process wherein a majority of duly elected representatives of the people enacted it into law after over a year of debate. The law was challenged by its opponents and was deemed constitutional by the Judicial branch of our federal government. The process worked in exactly the way our Founding Fathers intended.This is how democracy is supposed to work. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. I didn’t notice any conservative hotheads screeching for armed revolt when this same court struck down a century old law in Montana in order to protect the odious and failed Citizens United precedent just last week. Frankly, I’m tired of conservatives threatening violence every time they don’t get their own way. It’s not only childish. It’s un-American.
Un-American, indeed.
In other right-wing freakout news, tea partiers in Hell, Michigan plan to burn a copy of the Affordable Care Act today. They had planned the event under the assumption that SCOTUS would vindicate them which it decidedly did not.
A local “tea party” group won’t be able to bury the 2,409-page Affordable Care Act as planned, but will still go ahead and burn it.That’s how the Hartland Township-based RetakeOurGov reacted to Thursday’s news that a requirement for all Americans to have health insurance effective in 2014 will stand.
Today, the group will burn a copy of the 2010 bill outside the Dam Site Inn in the Putnam Township hamlet of Hell, but — considering the law’s key component remains — it won’t be able to declare the bill metaphorically dead. {…}
“If there’s any silver lining, it will certainly energize those who are against government-run health care to get out and increase their level of activity with respect to the election, get their friends involved. That’s the last chance,” [RetakeOurGov Treasurer Wes] Nakagiri said.
Right. Like the tea partiers weren’t already as fired up as they can be to remove our first black president from office.
This doesn’t change a damn thing in that regard. But it WILL fire up Obama supporters who now realize that, if Mitt Romney becomes president and is allowed to appoint judges to the Supreme Court, our future will look very, very different.
See you in November, my friends.
UPDATE: Now Davis is sorry:
A former spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party denied Thursday that he called for “armed rebellion” in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the landmark health care reform law, but apologized for sending an e-mail that contained “unedited work product.”“Mea culpa,” said Matt Davis, an attorney who last year was a spokesman for the state GOP. He also was a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections under former Gov. John Engler. Davis was a Free Press reporter in the 1990s.
“I should have read it more carefully. I would take out the part about armed rebellion,” he said.
Give me a damn break. Which part was “unedited”? The title??? Honestly, who would hire a freak like this as their lawyer???
[CC image credit: Alex Proimos | Flickr]
