Fake Quotations on Guns

Many posts here have discussed fake quotations from famous figures, including Jefferson. Gun control is one subject, as CNN reports (h/t Brian Sutter):

The Founding Fathers are frequently quoted in the gun control debate, but many of those quotations turn out to be fake.

The most popular comment on a recent story about gun control featured a purported quotation from Thomas Jefferson. More than 2,000 votes pushed it to the top.

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty," reads the quotation. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

The same quotation has been posted dozens of times in other readers' posts. Some readers worked to debunk it by mentioning Monticello.org, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's website, which has a section devoted to "spurious" quotations that have been attributed to the third president of the United States. The website lists several variations of the quotation, featured on two pages, and says staff "have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote" those words.

...

The GunCite website includes quotations from the founding fathers, but has pages for debunked and reliable remarks. Site creator Howard Picard said the quotes help explain the Constitution's meaning.

"There are politicians, scholars, jurists, and others who don't believe the Second Amendment was intended to preserve and guarantee an individual right to arms outside of active militia duty," Picard said. "Some go as far as to claim firearms ownership was solely a collective right."
He said the quotes show that the Second Amendment was intended to protect not only a "vigorous individual right" but also "to serve as a check against an usurpation of our government."

Saul Cornell, a professor at Fordham University, said some quotations may need context, especially those from the "losing side" of debates. He added that he believes both sides of the gun conversation tend to oversimplify the Founding Fathers' historical intent.

"Without being too professorial about it," he said, "depending on what theory of the Constitution we use, you can get very different interpretations of the Second Amendment."

The Debt and the Constitution

Senate Democratic leaders have written President Obama:

In the event that Republicans make good on their threat by failing to act, or by moving unilaterally to pass a debt limit extension only as part of unbalanced or unreasonable legislation, we believe you must be willing to take any lawful steps to ensure that America does not break its promises and trigger a global economic crisis — without Congressional approval, if necessary

AP explains:

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is among those urging Obama to consider options like invoking the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to find ways around the $16.4 trillion legal cap on government borrowing. The amendment states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned,” which some lawmakers believe permits a way out of the debt limit jam.

At The Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in 2011:

Unfortunately, there is no plausible way to read this provision as providing the president the ability to increase the debt ceiling without congressional action.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says that it is Congress that has the power "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." The Constitution thus could not be clearer that borrowing money requires congressional action. Nothing in Section 4 of the 14th Amendment takes this power away from Congress or assigns it to the president. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment says only that the debt of the United States shall not be questioned; it says nothing about who gets to determine the size of the debt or in any way shifts this power from the legislature to the executive.

The power of the purse -- including the authority to tax, spend and borrow -- is quintessentially legislative. Not even a dire financial emergency would allow the president to take this over. The Constitution, thankfully, has no provision allowing for its suspension even in times of crisis.

Moreover, the debt ceiling is set by statute. Unless this law is unconstitutional, which it obviously isn't, the president cannot unilaterally repeal it and replace it with another law setting a higher debt ceiling.

Laurence Tribe, who once taught a young law student named Barack Obama, made a similar argument.

Around the same time as these articles, the president said:

There's a provision in our Constitution that speaks to making sure that the United States meets its obligations. And there have been some suggestions that a President could use that language to basically ignore this debt ceiling rule, which is a statutory rule. It's not a constitutional rule. I have talked to my lawyers. They do not—they are not persuaded that that is a winning argument. So the challenge for me is to make sure that we do not default, but to do so in a way that is as balanced as possible and gets us at least a downpayment on solving this problem.

Best Document of the Whole Obama Administration

Some 34,000 people have signed an online petition to build a Death Star.  Here is the White House response:

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

The Language of the Lincoln Movie

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is a magnificent film that gets the big things right.  The script beautifully articulates his belief in self-evident truths:

Here are his actual words, in an 1859 letter:

One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.

But the picture errs in some smaller ways. At The Atlantic, Benjamin Schmidt writes:

I'm not the first to look at the historical accuracy of Lincoln's language. But by using massive databases of digital texts—in particular, the Ngrams corpus that Google created in collaboration with the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, where I have a fellowship—I can do it very comprehensively. Kushner relied on his ears to know when to look up a particular word. I lack that sensitivity, so instead I have a computer program that can tackle the problem more crudely: It simply checks every single word and phrase of up to three words (in Lincoln, there are 15,000 of them) to flag places where the script seems to be departing from language published in books. This "anachronism machine" produces dozens of potential leads I can track down in dictionaries, old newspapers, and other sources.Using computers for tasks like this is useful because it gives a completely different perspective. The statistics can help uncover shifts in American language and culture over the last century and a half that no one has noticed—although we still have to decide what they mean.

Schmidt finds many anachronisms, such as the term "peace talks," which comes from the latter half of the 20th century, and the name "Kevin," which was extremely rare in the United States of 1865.

Even the phrase "13th Amendment" is out of place. At the time, people just said the "constitutional amendment" or the "slavery amendment": It had been 60 years since the last amendment, and no one was in the habit of numbering them. The same sort of mistake dogs the movie's discussion of racial equality. One particular character makes more than his share of this sort of mistake: the radical Congressman Asa Vintner Litton (Stephen Spinella, playing a composite character who seems most closely based on Henry Winter Davis). In one of the film's key scenes, Stevens refuses to state his belief in full equality to Congress in order to help the amendment on its way. Litton is furious: "You refused to say that all humans are, well... human!" But in 1865, referring to people as "humans" was slang, not an elevating way of being inclusive. Had a real Asa Litton wanted to express the notion of universal equality, he would have, like Thomas Jefferson a century before or Lyndon Johnson a century later, mentioned "all men;" even if he were being gender-neutral, he would have said "persons." In a similar vein, Litton and Ashley each talk about "racial equality" and "race equality" as the eventual goal, but the phrase would have been "Negro equality." Nowadays, that sounds like a completely meaningless difference, but actually, the difference between "Negro" and "racial" equality underscores just how adaptable American racism can be. One of the strangest results of "Negro equality" in Reconstruction was a short period when the California supreme court re-interpreted a law that prohibited blacks, Native Americans, and Chinese from testifying against white men: Thanks to the actions of the Radicals in Congress, blacks were now free from Chinese testimony as well.

Tax Code Complexity

Our chapters on bureaucracy and economic policy discuss the complexity of the US tax code. In a new report, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson identifies that complexity as the most serious problem 
facing taxpayers.  An infographic:

 

NRA Membership Up

In 2004, Miller and Krosnick conducted an experiment confirming that policy change threat does motivate contributions to interest groups. Since the Newtown tragedy, supporters of gun control have stepped up their efforts, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has even mentioned the word "confiscation." Now, Politico reports on the predictable response:

NRA TELLS PLAYBOOK it has gained over 100,000 new paid members in the past 18 days (Newtown shooting was Dec. 14), from 4.1 million to 4.2 million: “Our goal is to get to 5 million before this debate is over.” Membership is $25, and comes with a choice of three gifts: Rosewood Handle Knife, Black & Gold Duffel Bag or Digital Camo Duffel Bag. Meeting with Vice President Joe Biden at 1:45 p.m. in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building today will be James Jay (Jim) Baker, the NRA’s director of federal affairs, who works for Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA’s chief lobbyist). Baker has dealt with Biden personally many times before, and they both are fixtures at the Delaware beach. Baker was in Cox's post during the ’90's for the Brady Bill and first assault-weapons bill.

Americans Still Support the Death Penalty

Previous posts have discussed levels of support for capital punishment. Gallup reports:

Americans' support for the death penalty as punishment for murder has plateaued in the low 60s in recent years, after several years in which support was diminishing. Sixty-three percent now favor the death penalty as the punishment for murder, similar to 61% in 2011 and 64% in 2010.

Gallup first asked Americans for their views on the death penalty using this question in 1936, and has asked it at least annually since 1999. The latest results come from a Dec. 19-22, 2012, USA Today/Gallup survey, conducted in the first few days after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting massacre.

Although views on the death penalty have been fairly static since 2010, support has been gradually diminishing since the high point in 1994, when 80% were in favor. By 2001, roughly two-thirds were in favor, and since then it has edged closer to 60%.

The death penalty is not relevant in the Newtown case, given that the lone gunman took his own life after his rampage; however, the tragedy could have influenced Americans' thoughts about capital punishment and may be a reason support for it held steady this year, rather than declining any further.

As with so many issues, opinion has become more polarized by party:

Additionally, the trend differs by party ID, with support dropping most precipitously among Democrats, from 59% in 2001 to 51% today.

Gallup found a dip in support for the death penalty among independents in 2003, but their views since returned to prior levels and, at 65%, independents' current support for the death penalty is similar to what it was in 2001. At 80%, Republicans' current support also matches the 2001 level.

Even in deep-blue California, voters still support the death penalty.  In the 2012 election, as Barack Obama was winning the state by 23 percentage points, a measure to repeal capital punishment went down to defeat, 52-48 percent.