Some folks may remember last summer’s dust-up over this. There was a bill before Congress to get the District of Columbia a seat in the House. John Ensign tacked the Second Amendment Enforcement Act onto it, and it became something of a poison pill. Democrats were unable to excise his amendment, and if the District was to get a house seat, they’d have to comply with the Heller ruling.
Rather than risk abandoning the District’s unconstitutional and disastrous regulations, Congress chose to simply drop the whole matter completely.
Well, history repeats itself, though rarely this quickly. This year’s version quickly found the Ensign amendment attached to it, and again Congress chose not to decide.
Paul Helmke’s response was to gloat, calling the whole thing a “Faustian bargain” and voicing his pleasure that the District would be sticking to its guns, even if it cost them something advocates of DC statehood consider to be a huge priority.
It all raises a difficult question, however. What if Congress had chosen to pass the bill, with the Ensign amendment? Would it have been worth the compromise?
Washington DC isn’t a state, and as such, they don’t qualify for representation. The Supreme Court ruled as such twice, in District of Columbia v. Murphy (1941) and District of Columbia v. Carter (1973). Article I and Section 2 of the 14th Amendment only mention the states as being entitled to send representatives to the House.
Clearly, there’s a need to enforce Heller in some way. The District is doing their best to ignore the constitutional rights of its citizens, as well as the ruling of the Supreme Court. But would we be playing a little too fast and loose with the Constitution if we supported the Voting Rights Act to further the cause of the 2nd Amendment?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Do the ends justify the means, and do we risk making some Faustian deals ourselves?
3 thoughts on “D.C Voting Rights Act Dead”
Faustian deals always come back to bite all parties. The Law of Unintended Consequences will always see to that, and make sure that the consequences are entirely unpredictable. The ends do not always justify the means, there is a legal framework to use, and if it is ignored by the other side, then legitimate protest is a valid option. Which, given the issue at hand, opens up a whole can of worms, particularly regarding how you protest.
The gun amendments were severable from the clearly unconstitutional voting bill. As such, we either stopped a bad bill or used it’s otherwise inevitable passage (until struck by the courts) to strengthen the effect of the bill of rights.
What’s disconcerting is that it appears the NRA may have intentionally scuttled the compromise in an attempt to moot Palmer….
-Gene
I may be reading it wrong, but according to Section 7:
That would mean, if one part is scuttled, all the rest is. So what’s the point?
Is the cause of the 2nd Amendment being reduced to a political tool?