Posts Tagged ‘Lujan Grisham’

Gun-Banning NM Governor Smacked Down Again

Sunday, December 10th, 2023

You may remember New Mexico Democratic Governor Lujan Grisham from such previous hits as I can unilaterally suspend parts of the Constitution I don’t like by decree. She made the foolish decision to try to extend her illegal decree, and was smacked down yet again by the courts. Here’s William Kirk of Washington Gun Law on the case:

  • “The case we’re talking about today is Springer v Grisham. This is one of many many challenges to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s gubernatorial order, where she sua sponte suspended the Second Amendment rights of everybody in the city of Albuquerque as well as the surrounding county.”
  • “There was certain parts of that order that were stripped down right away by the courts, but there are other parts that kept going.”
  • “A gubernatorial order on a public health emergency. Where have we ever seen that before?”
  • “In the the People’s Republic of Washington, we had a public health emergency a few years ago, where our governor promised us 15 days to flatten the curve and he shut down the whole state…after almost 900 days, 900 days, the governor finally released most of his emergency power.”
  • Grisham keeps extending the emergency gun order.
  • “The two issues that were challenged here in Springer were governor Grisham’s prohibition on firearms in parks and in playgrounds, and this ended up before the United States district court for the District of New Mexico and the judge here has enjoined the order on parks.”
  • “The restrictions on the playgrounds still remain in effect.” Per the decision: “The government has demonstrated that playgrounds are analogous to sensitive places where there is a longstanding history of firearm regulations.” Responsible gun owners may argue against this on a the basis of logic (lawfully armed citizens prevent unlawful behavior), but at least the court is now applying the Bruen decision.
  • Indeed, the decision itself states “defendants have not satisfied the test set forth in Bruen at this stage, as they have not demonstrated a historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of firearms in public parks. The Court therefore enters a preliminary injunction enjoining the public health order to the extent it prohibits carrying firearms in public parks in Bernalillo County and Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Just the fact that district courts are now citing Bruen in the first pages of their decisions is a huge win.
  • WK: “There is a litany of case law out there that says ‘Listen, if you’re violating a constitutional right in general, then we will presume that to be irreparable harm. So we’re talking about the violation of one’s Second Amendment rights, this activity is clearly covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment. So the Court’s willingness to enjoin this law is incredibly positive, because it also shows the court believe that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail.”
  • New Mexico relied heavily on the case Maryland Shall Issue Inc. vs. Montgomery County, but the decision pointed out that was decided pre-Bruen.

    • By actually applying the Bruen test, and using it to strike down half of the remaining decree, the courts have giving gun owners at east three-fourths of a loaf here.

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns, Regulation | 5 Comments »

    New Mexico’s Democratic Governor Gun Ban Overreach Unites Own Party Against Her

    Tuesday, September 12th, 2023

    New Mexico Democratic Governor Lujan Grisham declaration that she could unilaterally suspend parts of the United State Constitution by decree have gone over like a depleted uranium balloon:

    New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general notified the governor, a fellow Democrat, on Tuesday that he will not defend her in litigation challenging her public health order temporarily banning firearms in certain counties and imposing other gun restrictions.

    The prohibition applies to Albuquerque and Bernalillo counties.

    “Though I recognize my statutory obligation as New Mexico’s chief legal officer to defend state officials when they are sued in their official capacity, my duty to uphold and defend the constitutional rights of every citizen takes precedence,” New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez wrote to fellow Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in a letter. “Simply put, I do not believe that the Emergency Order will have any meaningful impact on public safety but, more importantly, I do not believe it passes constitutional muster.”

    Multiple plaintiffs — the National Association for Gun Rights, We the Patriots USA, residents of the affected counties, and Gun Owners of America — filed lawsuits against Grisham and her administration over the dictate.

    Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen announced Monday that his office would not enforce the order, arguing that it is unconstitutional, according to the NM Political Report.

    “There’s no way we can enforce that order. This ban does nothing to curb gun violence,” Allen said at a Monday press conference. “We must always remember not only are we protecting the Second Amendment, but at the same time, we have a lot of violence within our community. Let me be clear, I hold my standards high, and I do not or never will hedge on what is right.”

    Know who else won’t enforce the ban? Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Police Chief Harold Medina. That pretty much leave only the state police to enforce Grisham’s unconstitutional ban. And none of them were in evidence when 150 or so New Mexico citizens violated the ban without being arrested.

    Prior to Grisham’s unconstitutional decree, open carry was “legal in New Mexico without a license for anyone at least 19 years of age who can legally possess a firearm.” And, actually, it still is, it’s just that Grisham and her lackeys want to pretend she has the power to abrogate the constitution and pass laws by royal decree without benefit of the legislative branch.

    It’s well documented that Democrats love banning guns almost as much as graft and abortion. The fact that so many prominent New Mexico Democrats have said categorically that they won’t back Grisham’s insane power play is telling as to just how far out of the mainstream her illegal ban grab is.

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns, Regulation | 9 Comments »

    BidenWatch for June 15, 2020

    Monday, June 15th, 2020

    Biden comes out of his basement and sees his shadow, more questions about China and Ukraine, more veepstakes, and questioning just how much of that #BlackLivesMatter money ActBlue is raking in goes to Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “Financial Contributions to Black Lives Matter are Being Funneled to Biden Campaign“:

    After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”

    Joe Biden is the top beneficiary of the ActBlue’s fundraising efforts.

    Is there any evidence that BLM funds donated through ActBlue aren’t going to Biden? If so, who are the recipients?

  • Reminder: Biden once had a very different view of street disorder and black lives:

  • “Madam president, we have predators on our streets…they are beyond the pale”:

    I’m not sure that highlighting the 1994 crime bill will actually cost Biden votes, but showing videos like this does provide a stark contrast of the Joe Biden of today and the Joe Biden of the past who obviously had a far more functional brain…

  • Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying:

    Creepy Joe Biden is beginning to emerge from the basement again, and the results have not been auspicious thus far.

    Cut to Philadelphia, Wednesday. He was sporting the de rigueur mask, but it was dangling loosely from his left ear, as if he’d forgotten it. That made his statement attacking President Trump (I think) all the more bizarre.

    All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:

    “You know, the rapidly rising uh, um, uh, in with the — with the — I don’t know, uh uh,” he said, finally looking up in utter confusion from his notes.

    “His, his just inability to focus on any federal responsibility,” Biden mumbled, and I don’t believe he’s been seen outside the basement since.

    That latest stumble got a good leaving alone from approximately 99% of the media’s Democrat stenographers. So the next day the Trump campaign manager put out an email demanding that the press’s Democrat rump swabs “stop protecting Biden.”

    “The failure to expose the American people to these rambling displays of incoherence, ineptitude and forgetfulness is depriving voters of a clear picture of Biden’s inability to execute the duties of the office he seeks.”

    Which is exactly why Biden’s comrades in the media are doing their damnedest to keep him under wraps.

  • All of which explains why Democrats want Biden out of sight:

    Staying out of the limelight is good for Biden because the election is not about him. It’s about Trump and his missteps, and Biden is the generic Democratic alternative to another four years of the current administration.

    Biden’s campaign is explicitly trying to define the election based on whether or not to give Trump four more years in office. A slide in a Biden campaign strategy briefing last month said, “This election is a referendum on Trump.”

    “If the country is asked to have an up or down vote on whether or not Donald Trump should receive four more years, the country would say no, and [the Trump campaign] themselves admit it,” Biden campaign strategist Mike Donilon said during the presentation.

    Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe plainly explained why Biden does not need to be out in the open during a video call with a local Democratic group over the weekend.

    “People say all the time, ‘Oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement,’ He’s fine in the basement,” McAuliffe said. “Two people see him a day: his two body people. That’s it.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Hey hey ho, it’s Word Salad Joe:

  • Biden wants to undo Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reforms:

    Will a Joe Biden presidency derail housing reform and the “recap and release” of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

    The answer is a resounding “yes,” according to housing analysts who have ties to Biden’s economic advisers and their thinking on what might happen to the housing giants, if as current polls suggest, the former vice president unseats Donald Trump and becomes president in November….affordable housing is a significant issue to Biden and he would like to expand Fannie and Freddie’s mandate and likely keep them under government control.

    Of course they do. How else are Democrats supposed to rake off the graft?

  • Stephen Kruiser thinks that now is the time for Trump to start going after Biden:

    We all agreed that Trump has been too tepid lately and not using the instincts that blew up the political world in 2016.

    We are all aware that Joe Biden has benefited greatly from his pandemic-induced basement quarantine. He’s such a train wreck that his handlers are no doubt working overtime to come up with excuses to keep him away from the campaign trail and — more importantly — from sharing a debate stage with President Trump.

    The three of us agreed that President Trump needs to seize the initiative now and start goading Biden to get back in the public eye and into a debate. One of Trump’s greatest gifts is the thing that drives old guard Republicans crazy — his ability to drive a narrative on social media. Now is the time for him to use that bully pulpit and relentlessly bait Biden and force his hand.

    Biden can’t win a Twitter throwdown with Trump. His handlers are tweeting for him and they are not the most inventive lot. His Twitter feed reads like something that came from a book titled “Democrat-y Stuff Candidates Should Say.” It would be very easy for the president to make Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep look awful all day, every day. The end game is to get Biden back in public, of course, but there is an immediate return on investment in a Twitter flame war.

    In my five years of watching Donald Trump in the political arena, the only thing I’ve learned is that Trump probably isn’t going to do what I expect him to do, or think he should, and that what he ends up doing will probably be more effective than what I suggested. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Don’t buy Biden’s new tough on China act:

    Biden spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring China’s abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by our greatest rival for global leadership. The “made in China” era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America’s ability to produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

    This disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was more gung ho than Joe Biden, the poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a platform diametrically opposed to the “open markets and open borders” philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against China’s malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for American workers.

    While Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of China’s rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through deals with Chinese state-owned companies.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Ukraine busts $6M bribe scheme for gas company that hired Hunter Biden.”
  • Biden leading in swing states, yadda yadda yadda. Consider this your periodic reminder that polls are pretty much meaningless this election season. The one poll I dug into, for Texas, undersampled Republicans by about seven points, so expect widespread media falsification of just about every media to help drag Biden over the line.
  • Another reason not to believe those polls: When you ask people who they think will win, a majority agree that President Trump will beat Biden, 51%-37%. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Trump camp slams Biden as obstacle to black-owned business rebound“:

    As data show recent riots and the months-long COVID-19 economic shutdown hurt black-owned businesses more than any other racial group, the Trump campaign slammed rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for a “weak” response to these challenges.

    Democratic governors generally have been more hesitant to reopen their states’ economies than Republicans, leading to criticism from President Trump and his campaign, which argues that delays hurt black-owned enterprises.

    The Trump campaign pointed to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing there has been a a 41% decline in the number of black business owners from February to April of this year, driven by the COVID-19 shutdown.

    “President Trump’s background as an entrepreneur and builder shapes his passion for protecting, supporting and empowering American black-owned business owners, especially right now,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member told Just the News. “Every day Joe Biden fails to strongly call an end to the looting, and rioting in urban cities, more black-owned businesses are destroyed. Every day Joe Biden fails to support efforts to safely and expeditiously re-open the economy, more black businesses are destroyed. The data shows a prolonged economic shutdown hurts black American entrepreneurs, so Joe Biden’s opposition is standing in the way of black generational wealth, growth and opportunities.”

  • More veepstakes pandering. “Among the candidates who have progressed to the point of more comprehensive vetting or have the potential to do so are Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), former national security adviser Susan E. Rice and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, all of whom are black. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is white, is also in that group, as is New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is Latina.”
  • Another veepstakes piece:

    The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.

    Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.

    Meaningless boilerplate horse-race verbiage snipped.

    Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.

    Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren have been interviewed at length by Mr. Biden’s team, as has Ms. Baldwin, who was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Senate.

    Two women with distinctive national-defense credentials have also been interviewed and asked for documents: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war combat veteran who is Asian-American, and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.

    As the vetting process advances to a newly intense phase, the political currents of the last few weeks are also leaving a mark on the Biden team’s deliberations. The wave of demonstrations touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer there, has elevated a pair of black women long regarded as intriguing long-shot candidates: Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms.

    Though Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms are far less known to the national electorate than other figures on Mr. Biden’s list, they have played crucial roles in a cascading civil rights crisis: Ms. Demings, a former police chief in Orlando, Fla., has become a major figure in the law-enforcement debate, while Ms. Bottoms’s handling of chaotic demonstrations in her city earned her national acclaim.

    For “national acclaim” read “less incompetent than other Democratic mayors.

  • The Biden campaign does some tranny pandering.
  • Oopsie!

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