Mark Small

(2) If Nurse Beth wants a strict construction of the Constitution, Amend XIX only secures women the right to vote - and no other rights. To be consistent, she needs to keep her mouth shut. For argument’s sake, let’s move on 10/25

The Fed supposedly “overreaches” through that bastion of usurpation of rights, the EPA. However: (1) States did not do a great job of keeping our air and waters clean - see “Lake Erie catches fire”;... 11/25

(2) Nurse Beth should be careful: EPA was a (proud) legacy of a GOP President, Richard Nixon; and (3) Amend XIV, sec 1 requires equal protection of the law and Art. I sec 8 cl 3 gives Congress the power to regulate commerce. 12/25

The Constitution does not require we “protect” it from an agency created under a GOP Prez. As a half-way measure, maybe we could require CEOs of corporations that pollute to live within one mile downstream and downwind from their operations. 13/25

Nurse Beth promises to “protect the Second Amendment.” Nearly 40,000, people die each year from guns. In 2017 approximately sixty percent (60%) of gun deaths were suicides (23,854). 14/25

I think we need protection from people with a warped interpretation of the Second Amendment. 15/25

A GOP-nominated (and confirmed) Chief Justice Warren Burger did not view the Second Amendment as conferring a right to individuals to own guns. He was quoted in a 2002 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Judicial Circuit... 16/25

“one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word `fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I've ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure ... 17/25

that state armies the militia would be maintained 4 defense of the state Very language of 2nd Amendment refutes any argument it was intended 2 guarantee every citizen unfettered rt 2 any kind of weapon he/she desires Silvera v. Lockyer, 312 F.3d 1052, 1063 (9th Cir. 2002). 18/25

The NRA is an organization fueled by money from a foreign dictatorship. In early 2018 the NRA said it had received one contribution from a Russian; shortly after, according to NPR. the NRA admitted it received over two dozen contributions from Russians. 19/25

The NRA wants people to have unfettered access to guns, no matter how many suicides or children’s corpses litter this country. Russia’s Putin pays out and he expects results, damn it! 20/25

Only relatively recently has the Court strayed from the “militia” analysis. In 1939 the Court upheld the constitutionality of a Federal law that prohibited the transport of sawed-off shotguns in interstate commerce. U.S. v. Miller,307 U.S. 174, 178 (1939). 21/25

As far as Nurse Beth’s promise to protect the “unborn,” there are no such rights. She reads things into The Constitution that are not there. Until the mid-Nineteenth Century abortions before “quickening” were legal. Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 110, 138 (1973). 22/25

If The Framers had wanted to make such a distinction, they could have. They did not. Justice Blackmun, nominated to the Court by a GOP President, wrote the opinion in Roe. I stand by the conservative reasoning in that case. 23/25

Our Constitution is under attack, but not from people who seek to end the gun-driven carnage of people already born. Our Constitution and our country are under attack from Russia. The current occupant of the Oval Office has aided and abetted that attack. 24/25