In New Mexico, the Democratic governor apparently thinks the Constitution doesn’t apply to her.
“New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence,” the Associated Press reported. “The Democratic governor said she expects legal challenges but she was compelled to act because of recent shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week. Lujan Grisham said state police would be responsible for enforcing what amount to civil violations.”
The New Mexico governor claims that emergency powers give her the ability to simply suspend constitutional law. But the Albuquerque police chief is already saying he won’t enforce her order because it’s unconstitutional: “No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute,” Grisham stated. “There are restrictions on free speech. There are restrictions on my freedoms. In this emergency, this 11-year-old, and all these parents who have lost all these children, they deserve my attention to have the debate about whether or not in an emergency, we can create a safer environment. Because what about their constitutional rights?”
When people speak of political fascism, this is it. When a member of the government simply declares via emergency order that they can willy-nilly violate full-scale constitutional rights based on no actual emergency — we are not talking about a tornado hitting the state or some sort of giant earthquake — that’s fascism. She is basically saying, “I don’t like that people got shot. Therefore, I’m banning you from exercising your constitutional rights.”
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
You could do this for anything. Someone could say, “Listen, we have a national epidemic of hate.” (You’ve seen this in places like Chicago, where the former mayor, Lori Lightfoot, tried to declare that racism was a public health emergency.) You could see somebody like this idiot governor saying, “Racism and hate are public health emergencies, and I’m declaring an emergency. Therefore, you are not allowed to say the following words in my state,” and then just list them. That would be a significant First Amendment violation.
She could go even further. She could say, “You’re not allowed to use the internet because the internet obviously has facilitated so much violence. I’ve decided in my state, you’re not allowed to use it — not on the basis of any sort of elected legislative session, but on the basis of my own judgment that an emergency has now been constituted because I don’t like what is happening.” If all of your rights are simply dependent on one lady deciding she really doesn’t like what is happening in the world, that is tyranny. That is the essence of tyranny.
It’s amazing she would try this, but it was always going to happen. The minute we shut down everything in the world for COVID, and then maintained that for two years, even as the data emerged that it actually wasn’t the sort of national emergency that was being suggested, it was only a matter of time before Democratic officials tried to do something like this.
If this is the new way the Democrats make law, then they could do it on the basis of anything.
And that’s a pretty terrifying prospect.