The Mayor of New York City is so frustrated with the lack of gun laws that he calls for an illegal police strike to blackmail people into supporting them.
I, for one, have no personal agenda against cities like LA, Chicago and New York experimenting with gun laws. Why doesn’t the mayor just pass a total assault weapon ban in New York City (isn’t that already the law there) and let’s see what happens. That is, after all, the essence of federalism. The problem in Bloomberg’s world may be what the Supreme Court did in 2010 when it decided that the Second Amendment provides an individual right of gun ownership trumping the authority of State and local governments to prohibit same. It did this through interpreting the 14th Amendment’s “due process” guarantee as incorporating the Second Amendment into the law of the States as as I have previously explained.
So, it appears to me that the Mayor is upset by the very same thing which has gotten much of the rest of the country boiling mad with a federal court system seemingly obsessed with micromanaging purely local issues. In addition to providing gun rights to individuals in those States and municipalities which are interested in curtailing them, they likewise intervene in cases involving school prayer, abortion rights, land use, public employee rights and even as lowly an issue as the terms of school dress codes. Many people can sympathize with Mayor Bloomberg’s anger. It has seemed to many of us for a long time that it is not good that the public will of individual States and their subdivisions should be judicially preempted in so many ways. An overly broad definition of the term “due process” together with courts filled with hubris has inserted the federal courts into every nook and cranny of America’s public and private life. Is the breadth of the 14th Amendment which has been “recognized” in the last 60 years really the intention of the people who adopted the 14th Amendment in 1868 to protect the rights of former slaves? Doubtful.
And, it should be remembered that Mayor Bloomberg, in his anger, is not just anybody calling for illegal strikes by police. As mayor of New York City, a city driven to near breakdown in 1966-68 with illegal job actions by public employees including transit workers, sanitation workers, fire fighters and police, he is certainly aware of the history of such strikes. They nearly resulted in municipal bankruptcy for NYC in 1975. Can he really be suggesting the sort of disregard for law which almost broke his city? Would he authorize a strike by servicemen who feel that the army is shortchanging them on bombproof vehicles? I doubt it. That would be anarchy and Mayor Bloomberg certainly wouldn’t be calling for that, would he? Be careful what you wish for Mr. Mayor!!!!!
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