The Politcs Beat column by Chris Graham
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Why is Bob Goodlatte banging the drum on the Second Amendment?
“You can count on me to fight to protect our rights,” Goodlatte wrote in a fund-raising letter dated May 16 that he began with mention of a case now in front of the United States Supreme Court that he said “could impact our constitutional right to own a firearm.”
The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involves the controversial Washington, D.C., gun-control law that basically bans private handgun ownership and requires that rifles and shotguns kept in private homes be outloaded and disassembled or outfitted with a trigger lock.
Well-intentioned though it may be in a city with the nation’s highest murder rate, it doesn’t seem to have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing constitutional muster on our conservative high court, and those who seem to be most concerned about the ruling that will be handed down by the justices are not those in the National Rifle Association and related groups but the representatives of the gun-control lobby, who are worried that the Supreme Court could end up destabilizing gun-control laws in place nationwide with an adverse ruling in this case.
But what are facts when you’re trying to raise the spectre of big government swooping in to take your guns, not to mention trying to raise money?
“The Democrats nationally, and especially here in Virginia, feel emboldened by their recent successes and stand ready to force their liberal views on America,” Goodlatte wrote in his fund-raising letter. “They’re not going to hold back this year and are going to do everything they can to obtain supermajorities in both houses of Congress. With just a few more seats in the U.S. Senate and the House, they will have the power to completely dominate the agenda and adopt a liberal anti-gun agenda that will reverse everything that we’ve worked so hard for since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Your right to own a gun could be in jeopardy if they defeat strong defenders of the Second Amendment like me.”
Too bad for Goodlatte that his Democratic opponent, Sam Rasoul, doesn’t fit the description that he gave him in that statement. Rasoul is on the record stating his strong support of the right of law-abiding citizens to bear arms as enumerated in the Bill of Rights. But again, what are facts when you’re trying to browbeat and fearmonger people into having a reason to vote for you?
And that’s the real reason for this letter. Goodlatte is banging the drum on the Second Amendment because he doesn’t want you to hear any of the noise that will be filling the air in the Valley and Central Virginia in the coming months about how he helped drag us into the quagmire in Iraq and marched in lockstep with the Bush-Cheney administration on energy policies that have more than tripled our gas prices in the past six years.
The longer he can keep your attention off that which matters, the better chance he has to keep us on the Road to Nowhere.
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Chris Graham
