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By Elvin Lim

The tragic shootings in Newtown, CT, have plunged the nation into the foundational debate of American politics.

Over at Fox News, the focus as been on mourning and the tragedy of what happened. As far as the search for solutions go, the focus has been on how to cope, what to say to children, and what to do about better mental health screening. It is consistent with the conservative view that when bad things happen, they happen because of errant individuals, not flawed societies. The focus on mourning indicates the view that when bad things happen, they are the inevitable costs of liberty.

At MSNBC, the focus has been on tragedy as a wake up call, not a thing in itself to simply mourn; on finding legislative and governmental solutions — gun control. This is consistent with the liberal view that when bad things happen, they happen because of flawed societies, not just the result of errant individuals or evil as an abstract entity.

The question of which side is right is an imponderable. Conservatives believe that in the end, our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. This was the logic behind the Second Amendment. It comes from a long line of Radical Whig thinking that the Anti-Federalists inherited. That is why Second Amendment purists can reasonably argue that that citizens should continue to have access to (even) semi-automatic guns. They will say that the Second Amendment is not just for hunting; it is for liberty against national armies. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that a government duly constituted by the people need not fear government; and it is citizen-on-citizen violence that we ought to try to prevent. This line of thinking began with Hobbes, who had theorized that we lay down our arms against each other, so that one amongst us alone wields the sword. Later, we called this sovereign the state. The Federalists leaned in this tradition.

Should we fear government more or fellow citizens who have access to guns? Should government or citizens enjoy the presumption of virtue? Who knows. There is no answer on earth that would permanently satisfy both political sides in America, because conservatives believe that most citizens, most of the time, are virtuous, and there is no need to take a legislative sledgehammer to restrict the liberty of a few errant individuals at the expense of everybody else. Liberals, conversely, believe that government and regulatory activity are virtuous and necessary most of the time, and there is little practical cost to most citizens to restrict a liberty (to bear arms) that is rarely, if ever, invoked. Put another way: conservatives focus on the vertical dimension of tyranny; liberals fear most the horizontal effects of mutual self-destruction.

What is a president to do? It depends on which side of the debate he stands. Barack Obama believes that the danger we pose to ourselves exceeds the danger of tyrannical government (for which a right to bear arms was originally codified). The winds of public opinion may be swaying in his direction, and Obama appeared to be ready to mould it when he asked: “Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?”

Here is one neo-Federalist argument that Obama can use, should he take on modern Anti-Federalists. If the Constitution truly were of the people, then it is self-contradictory to speak of vigilance against it. In other words, the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It was written in an era of monarchy, as a bulwark against Kings. To those who claim to be constitutional conservatives, Obama may reasonably ask: either the federal government is not sanctioned by We the People, and therefore we must forever be jealous of it; or, the federal government represents the People and we need not treat it as a distant potentate and overstate our fear of it.

If this is to be the age of renewed faith in government, as it appears to be Obama’s mission, then the President will be more likely to convince Americans to lay down our arms; he will persuade us that our vigilance against government by the people is counter-prouctive and anachronistic. But, to move “forward,” he must first convince the NRA and its ideological compatriots that we can trust our government. Only the greatest of American presidents have succeeded in this most herculean of tasks, for our attachment to the spirit of ’76 cannot be understated.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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The post On the Second Amendment: should we fear government or ourselves? appeared first on OUPblog.

By Susan Herman Post-9/11 surveillance measures have made it far too easy for the government to review our personal and business records, telephone and e-mail conversations, and virtually all aspects of our lives. For example, Under the so-called “library provision” of the

By Elvin Lim

In 2004, the Republican’s hot button political issue du jour was same-sex marriage. 11 states approved ballot measures that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Last week, a federal judge struck down California’s Proposition 8 (passed in 2008) because it “fails to advance any rational basis for singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”

However, Republicans politicians are not taking the bait to revisit this hot button political issue, despite Rush Limbaugh’s encouragement. One explanation is that Republican voters are already angry and motivated this year, and they are concerned about the economy and jobs. There is no need for Republicans to exploit a get-the-vote-out issue this year.

But, that is exactly what some Republicans have done, just not on the marriage issue. Instead, prominent Republicans like Senator Lindsay Graham and presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty are directing their attention this year on repealing the 14th Amendment, and in particular the provision guaranteeing birthright citizenship.

So is it or is it not “the economy, stupid,” for Election 2010? I think it’s about something even bigger than the economy. It’s about the power of the federal government, which increased dramatically with the passage of the 14th Amendment.

Consider that the first sentence of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”), which established the priority of national citizenship over state citizenship. While there were references to citizenship in the Constitution of 1789, the Framers did not define the content of citizenship in part because there was little need, at the time, to consider the idea of national citizenship as opposed to state citizenship. The nation as we know it today was not fully developed until the Civil War.

Read in totality, the first Section of the 14th Amendment isn’t so much a grant of birthright citizenship – the content of the first sentence – but a constraint on states’ rights, the point of the second: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” We know this to be historically accurate. Since the 1930s, the “equal protection” and “due process” clauses have been used against state actors to extend the scope and depth of federal governmental powers.

Fast forward to the 2010, and it is no coincidence that almost everything up for political debate today and in November has something to do with the power of federal government versus states’ rights, whether it be Arizona taking it upon itself to write its own immigration policy and the Obama administration insisting that immigration policy is a federal prerogative, or Missouri primary voters rejecting the federal (“Obamacare”) mandate that all individual citizens must buy health insurance, or Californians deciding in Proposition 8 that only marriages between a man and a woman are valid in their state. If the unifying thread in these agitations is the perception of a bloated, out-of-control federal government, it is also worth noting that the major resource for the aggrandizement of the government has been the 14th Amendment.

The Republican Party of 2010 is not the Republican Party of 1868, the year the 14th Amendment was ratified. The GOP, back then, believed in federal preemption of states’ rights. Democrats were the ones who were wary of federal power. The Rep