Tag Archives: Constitution

News

Iowa House passes constitutional amendment to define marriage

1 Comment

From Shane at Caffeinated Thoughts.

Excerpt:

The Iowa House passes HJR 6 by a vote of 62-37, this resolution introduces an amendment to the Iowa Constitution defining marriage to be between one man and one woman.

The entire Republican caucus voted in favor of the resolution minus State Representative Betty DeBoef (R-What Cheer) who was ill today.  Three Democrats joined with Republicans to vote yes – State Representatives Dan Muhlbauer (D-Manilla), Brian Quirk (D–New Hampton), and Kurt Swaim (D-Bloomfield).

Before Iowans can vote on the language in this amendment it first needs to pass the Iowa Senate.  Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal (D-Council Bluffs) has already promised to block a vote, and an attempted vote to bypass Senate rules to allow the Senate version to come to the floor to be debated and voted on failed.  The amendment would have to be passed again in the next General Assembly before it could be placed on the ballot.

It looks like the Democrats will block it in the Senate, because they oppose traditional marriage, and do not believe that children should be raised by a mother and a father. That’s why they support single motherhood, no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage.

Caffeinated Thoughts also had this post about the opponents of the definition of marriage bill.

Excerpt:

  • Family Planning Council of Iowa – their purpose is “to provide quality reproductive health care and family planning services to all people in Iowa who desire such services.”  Huh?  Protecting the traditional definition of marriage somehow diminishes their mission?  And yet, they have one lobbyist registered against.
  • Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO – they also have a lobbyist registered against HJR 6.  I wonder how the definition of marriage is a labor issue and how many of their members don’t expect their dues to pay for activity like this.
  • National Association of Social Workers – They have two lobbyists working against.  How this advances the social work field or impedes their members from doing their work I’ll never know, but it is further proof how this profession has been hijacked by the left.
  • AFSCME Iowa Council 61 – How again is this a labor issue?  Oh I know benefits… Nope, sorry if I were a union member I’d be ticked, and they have six three lobbyists registered against this bill.
  • Planned Parenthood of the Heartland – Interesting, I’m surprised they are advocating any type of monogamous relationship since they want to treat youth like they are a bunch of minks.  They have two lobbyists registered against.
  • Interfaith Alliance of Iowa – they should change their name to InterLiberalFaith Alliance of Iowa.

It’s important to understand which groups are left-wingers. Unions, abortion providers, religious pluralists, etc.

In a prior story, Arkansas Republicans passed a ban on taxpayer-funding of abortion.

News

Obamacare struck down as unconstitutional by Florida judge

1 Comment

Hans Bader again, writing at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

A judge in Florida just declared the health care law known as “Obamacare” unconstitutional, ruling it void in its entirety. Judge Vinson rightly declared the health care law’s individual mandate unconstitutional, since the inactivity of not buying health insurance is not an “economic activity” that Congress has the power to regulate under the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Under the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Morrison (2000), which I helped litigate, only “economic activity” can be regulated under the Commerce Clause, with the possible exception of those non-economic activities that harm instrumentalities of interstate commerce or cross state lines.)

Judge Vinson also rightly declared the law as a whole unconstitutional. The health care law lacks a severability clause. So if a major provision like the individual mandate is unconstitutional — as it indeed was — then the whole law must be struck down.

[…]As I noted earlier in The Washington Examiner, “To justify preserving the rest of the law, the judge” in the earlier Virginia case “cited a 2010 Supreme Court ruling [Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB] that invalidated part of a law — but kept the rest of it in force. But that case involved a law passed almost unanimously by Congress, which would have passed it even without the challenged provision. Obamacare is totally different. It was barely passed by a divided Congress, but only as a package. Supporters admitted that the unconstitutional part of it — the insurance mandate — was the law’s heart. Obamacare’s legion of special-interest giveaways that are ‘extraneous to health care’ does not alter that.” In short, Obamacare’s individual mandate is not “volitionally severable,” as case law requires.

The individual mandate provision also was not “functionally” severable from the rest of the law, since the very Congress that passed Obamacare deemed the individual absolutely “essential” to the Act’s overarching goals (as Judge Vinson in Florida correctly noted).

[…]Cato legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, who filed briefs against the law in Virginia, comments on today’s decision here, calling it a “victory for federalism and individual liberty

I also got two more opinions about what this means:

Not sure who to believe. An injunction would have been better.

Commentary

Do gun-free zones prevent multiple victim shootings?

4 Comments

Let’s take a look at what the media tells you about gun-free zones and multiple victim public shootings.

From Fox News.

Excerpt:

A Google news search using the phrase “Omaha Mall Shooting” finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide for the last day. From India and Taiwan to Britain and Austria, there are probably few people in the world who haven’t heard about this tragedy.

But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.

Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?

Nebraska allows people to carry permitted concealed handguns, but it allows property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property.

The same was true for the attack at the Trolley Square Mall in Utah in February (a copy of the sign at the mall can be seen here). But again the media coverage ignored this fact. Possibly the ban there was even more noteworthy because the off-duty police officer who stopped the attack fortunately violated the ban by taking his gun in with him when he went shopping.

[…]There are plenty of cases every year where permit holders stop what would have been multiple victim shootings every year, but they rarely receive any news coverage. Take a case this year in Memphis, where WBIR-TV reported a gunman started “firing a pistol beside a busy city street” and was stopped by two permit holders before anyone was harmed.

[…]Few know that Dylan Klebold, one of the two Columbine killers, closely was following Colorado legislation that would have allowed citizens to carry a concealed handgun. Klebold strongly opposed the legislation and openly talked about it.

No wonder, as the bill being debated would have allowed permitted guns to be carried on school property. It is quite a coincidence that he attacked the Columbine High School the very day the legislature was scheduled to vote on the bill.

Virginia Tech saw 32 murdered earlier this year; the Columbine High School shooting left 13 murdered in 1999; Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, had 23 who were fatally shot by a deranged man in 1991; and a McDonald’s in Southern California had 21 people shot dead by an unemployed security guard in 1984.

All these attacks — indeed, all attacks involving more than a small number of people being killed — happened in gun-free zones.

In recent years, similar attacks have occurred across the world, including in Australia, France, Germany and Britain. Do all these countries lack enough gun-control laws? Hardly. The reverse is more accurate.

The law-abiding, not criminals, are obeying the rules. Disarming the victims simply means that the killers have less to fear. As Wednesday’s attack demonstrated yet again, police are important, but they almost always arrive at the crime scene after the crime has occurred.

The longer it takes for someone to arrive on the scene with a gun, the more people who will be harmed by such an attack.

Most people understand that guns deter criminals. If a killer were stalking your family, would you feel safer putting a sign out front announcing, “This Home Is a Gun-Free Zone”? But that is what the Westroads Mall did.

And more from CNN.

Excerpt:

Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.

A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.

At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.

More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.

My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby’s Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden “feel good” politics.

And more gun-free zone shootings at the Holocaust Memorial and the University of Alabama. Killers are not stupid. They go to places where they know the risks of anyone stopping them are LOW.

Related posts