It’s good our Haines Borough Assembly is bullish on bullets. Otherwise it might run out of ammo shooting itself in the foot.
On Tuesday, the assembly plunged our local government into the national gun debate, passing a resolution “upholding individual rights protected by the Second Amendment.”
The resolution states, “the borough expresses its intent… to oppose… any efforts to unconstitutionally restrict such (Second Amendment) rights, and to use such legal means at its disposal to protect the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms.”
What does this even mean? How will the Haines Borough determine whether future gun restrictions are constitutional or not? Refer the matter to the GAS committee? Ring up Sean Hannity?
How did we even get here? How did guns become an assembly issue?
Was it because guns and gun rights in Haines weren’t already adequately protected by state and federal law? Was it because the assembly has already finished all its other homework and figured to loan its expertise to national issues? Was it because without Haines Borough involvement, the rights of Haines gun-owners would be trampled in Washington, D.C.?
It’s a good question and it hasn’t been answered by the resolution’s supporters.
It’s also a good question because assembly involvement in national politics outside its authority is something new and Tuesday’s action sure looks like a precedent.
If gun rights are important enough to bring to the assembly table, what about the rights of LGBQT people? What about the civil rights of black people in police custody? What about the rights of women to earn equal pay for equal work? Will the borough assembly be writing up resolutions to protect these rights, too?
Whatever a conservative-leaning assembly does on national issues, a liberal-leaning one can do in reverse. We could turn every assembly meeting into an episode of Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow. Could we even devise a better way to gum up the gears of local politics?
Already on Tuesday, Mayor Doug Olerud commented on national policies on mental health treatment and Jerry Lapp warned us of rioting spreading from big cities into rural areas. Suddenly, people we elected for their expertise in local issues are pontificating on national ones.
Finally, how did this resolution even make it on to the borough assembly agenda?
Why didn’t Mayor Olerud, who sets the agenda, just tell Paul Rogers who wanted it there, “Paul, this really isn’t in our bailiwick. Our borough charter doesn’t really give us authority to challenge federal law. Also, how do you expect the Haines Borough will determine the constitutionality of federal gun legislation? And where would we ever get the resources to challenge a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that we disagreed with?”
Mayor Olerud, who holds a college degree in history, could have done this. Borough clerk Alekka Fullerton, who has a law degree, could have done it as well.
Mayor Bob Henderson, a conservative who helped set up the Haines Borough and ruled it with an iron fist, would never put anything so far-afield on the assembly agenda.
But to answer the first question: Here’s part of the reason the gun resolution made it on the assembly agenda.
Every time a Democrat is elected president, the Koch Brothers, Fox News and the rest of the Right Wing Noise Machine starts squawking that the federal government is plotting to take away our rights and guns, brainwash us into Communism and legalize child molestation.
None of it is true, but if the Radical Right understands anything it knows how to play the fear card. As the American sage H.L. Mencken observed: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
In 2008, after Republicans had trashed the nation by blowing up Wall Street and nearly bankrupted the treasury with expensive and fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Right Wing Noise Machine cranked up the Tea Party on the lie that the soft-spoken black man elected president would soon revoke the constitution.
Carol Kelly, then serving as the chair of the Haines Borough School Board, dumped tea into the Haines harbor, saying she was afraid the federal government was going to seize the banks. Is it any wonder that another alumna of local school management, assembly member and former school principal Cheryl Stickler, appears to be standing at the ready to serve as her own U.S. Supreme Court?
Lord have mercy.
Please God, send us one, decent social studies teacher to explain why it’s not in our town council’s interest to spend its constituents’ time, money and energy on controversial national issues far beyond its jurisdiction and expertise.