Category: Politics

John Richardson comments on ATF renaming their headquarters after Elliot Ness, I guess like the FBI has named theirs after J. Edgar Hoover. John thinks this is actually appropriate:

To summarize, Ness didn’t get his man, he had questionable morals, he probably was an alcoholic, he covered up a crime, he couldn’t manage his money, and he was prone to wild exaggeration about his accomplishments. When you look at that summary of Ness’ life and career, who better to represent the modern day ATF?

Zing!

There’s a lot of discussion in the comments from the post the other day on a Virginia lawmaker’s attempt to outlaw oral sex for minors (but not regular sex). I used to be in the “Don’t legislate your morality on me!” camp as well, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I think there’s any such thing as law that isn’t imposed morality in some way or another, so I no longer find that line of argument all that persuasive.

I also tend to agree with originalist thinking which suggests the Constitution and Bill of Rights was never understood to be any barrier to laws that today are generally regarded as being unconstitutional. This is evidence by the number of states who had laws barring such practices, and even going so far as to establish religion. But that’s not to say I think in the modern era I think such laws are just fine and peachy.

I believe criminal law should generally reflect widely held societal values. We nearly universally agree that crimes like armed robbery, burglary, theft, fraud, murder, etc, are moral wrongs and deserving of legal punishment. Regardless of what the social consensus in 1782 Massachusetts was in regards to church attendance, or what the consensus was in regards to sodomy in 1779 Pennsylvania, the consensus today is not even close to universal. When laws fail to reflect a broad consensus, it undermines respect for the law as a whole. Prohibition is a great example of a moralizing law that failed to achieve any broad social consensus, and is widely regarded as a failure.

Randy Barnett, in his book Restoring the Lost Constitution, has interesting ideas about how incorporation of the 9th Amendment through the 14th Amendment brings about constitutional limits on the state police power, offering a more originalist theory for how anti-sodomy laws could be held unconstitutional. While I find this personally appealing, there’s a lot that I think could be criticized on originalist grounds. But regardless of whether a law is constitutional or not, I do think we wade into dangerous waters when we criminalize behavior there’s no broad social consensus for criminalizing. That is the root of “Don’t impose your morals on me!” I’ve often though that perhaps we should require a supermajority to create criminal laws, and leave bare majorities for matters like budgets, civil procedure, and other internal governmental matters. If government wants to create a crime with penalties, it should be on something most everyone agrees ought to be a crime.

I’ve finished with both my Civil War ancestors at the National Archives. I was really completely unprepared for how this whole thing was going to work, so I thought I might share some tips of anyone else decides to do some research there.

• You can bring your own flatbed scanner. I knew this ahead of time, so I brought mine. But a lot of documents are larger than the standard 8.5×11, so a standard consumer scanner meant for modern documents will fall short. If you can afford it, take a large format flat bed. The Archives does have one, but it’s usually being used by someone else.
• Be well hydrated ahead of time. They don’t allow any food or drink in the research room for obvious reasons, and it’s warm and dry. I was nearly ready to swill straight out of the Potomac by the time I got done.
• Don’t bring any more equipment than you can carry in. They do provide carts if you absolutely can’t carry your scan-o-magic 8000 deluxe, but everything is searched going in and out. No bags, or anything you can stuff anything into. They don’t check your pants though, so Sandy Berger is still good.
• The archives provides free locker space, but bring a quarter for the key slot. They also have a cafeteria.
• The research room is under guard and heavy surveillance. It’s pretty safe to leave your stuff and go catch a break.
• Bring a power strip. They have plugs under the desks, but one is occupied by your desk lamp. I chose to go without the desk lamp.
• Civil War pension files tend to be much much larger than you would expect. It took a good solid two hours to scan each one, though I have an 8.5×11 scanner, so I had to do a lot of shifting of larger documents to capture everything.
• The Archive staff are incredibly helpful and nice.
• It’s really easy to get a researchers badge. Basically follow a power point presentation on how not to destroy history, and on how they do things, and it’s yours. Pay attention though because they explain how you request and check out documents.

I was really surprised. It’s interesting to hold original documents that your 3x great grandfather wrote by hand in ink. Because the Archives stores these documents under pretty ideal conditions, 150 year old documents look better than some of my family documents from the 1950s and 60s.

And just for those anti-gunners that act like no gun ever killed someone before Satan invented the semi-automatic firearm and marketed to paranoid gun nuts, reading the description of what happened to my 3rd great-grandfather at Antietam was pretty horrific. I’d like to see someone tell him that those old muskets weren’t fine killing machines.

First, the mini ball blew his right thumb clean off. Then it entered his chest about 4 inches below the nipple. It blew one of his ribs apart. According to one surgeon’s report, the ball passed between his lung and liver, and exited near his spinal column. Another later physicians report said the lung had been shot through, because he later received a pension increase for that wound due to breathing issues. I would think shot through the lung would be fatal back then, but maybe his lung was nonetheless still damaged. I’m sure there were bits of rib floating around in his body.