“You keep using that word,” said Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
He might as well have been talking to David Hogg — not Vizaini — and young Hogg’s March For Our Lives gun control advocacy group.
The word?
Partisan.
“On Wednesday,” writes Christian Britschgi at Reason, “the group released its Peace Plan for a Safer America with the ambitious goal of reducing gun deaths and injuries by 50 percent in 10 years.”
Among the issues their plan — a sort of “Gun New deal” — aims to tackle is the Supreme Court’s make-up of justices who support a common sense reading of the Second Amendment, which Hogg & Co. characterize as the result of “partisan political influence and interference.”
Favoring the right to bear arms or opposing socialized medicine isn’t “partisan” any more than favoring gun control and “Medicare for all.” We use the word “partisan” when members of parties behave in ways that align with their respective parties for little reason other than power, or when they cannot muster or even try for bipartisan support for their legislation.
When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama pushed through “Obamacare” without one Republican vote, that was partisan only because the Democrats could not muster any support across the aisle, quite astounding for a major new program.
Regarding the Supreme Court, we should remember that the standard for judgment is neither party nor policy, but constitutional law.
March for Our Lives wants a “national conversation” on restructuring the Supreme Court.
A better conversation would deal with actual partisan perversity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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