Gavin Newsom seems to have aspirations of being president. Had the Democrats held an actual primary, there's a good chance he'd have been the nominee. His party seems to like him for some ridiculous reason.
I still think that's what his proposed 28th Amendment--one heavy on gun control--was really all about. But he has a bit of a problem. It's not surprising to most of us.
See, he's a colossal hypocrite, particularly when it comes to things like what should require identification.
In most of the world, voting requires an ID. As John R. Lott has discussed in one of his papers, “[v]irtually all of Europe and almost all developed countries require in-person voters to use photo IDs to vote.” Here in the United States, each individual state operates its own elections, so we have a patchwork quilt of different laws. In total, 35 states require some form of ID to vote, with 22 of those requiring a photo ID.
California isn’t one of those states. In fact, when a city recently tried to implement its own voter ID laws following a majority vote of its residents to adopt such a measure, Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature acted quickly to pass Senate Bill 1174. The bill prohibits local governments from requiring voters to present identification when casting their ballots at the polls.
In California, it’s accepted as fact by Newsom’s party that voter ID laws are racist or otherwise suspect. In a statement promoting his earlier lawsuit against the city that passed the voter ID law, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said that “[i]mposing unnecessary obstacles to voter participation disproportionately burdens low-income voters, voters of color, young or elderly voters, and people with disabilities.”
...
Or rather, perhaps I could have respected them…if their inaction when it comes to concealed carry permit abuses didn’t expose them as complete hypocrites.
...Suffice it to say, California is not a constitutional carry state, nor does it honor any carry permits other than its own. And unlike most other states, California issues permits on a city and county level. Sheriffs and chiefs of police are authorized to issue CCW permits directly to applicants, subject to the requirements set by the state. Before Bruen, that meant that conservative counties were effectively shall-issue. As long as the applicant jumped through the necessary hoops and passed their background check, they would get a carry permit which is valid statewide.
But in several large coastal counties and cities, the situation was far different. Regular citizens usually couldn’t get a permit. And in some of them, there was “corrupt issue” of carry permits, i.e., only the rich and well-connected qualified.
The author, Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros goes on to recall the case of Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, which Cam covered extensively here. That is one of the more egregious cases of it that we've seen, but it's not the only one by a longshot.
Yet Moros's overall point, the hypocrisy involved in requiring extensive and burdensome permits to exercise the right to keep and bear arms, while viewing simply showing a picture ID while voting as racist, is incredibly telling.
When my home state of Georgia passed a voter ID requirement, it went up the judicial change before being overturned. It wasn't overturned because IDs were a problem, but because the state charged for them. The court ruled that it constituted an illegal poll tax, so the state tried again by making simple ID cards free and only charging for driver's licenses. That was upheld.
What's really racist is somehow believing that getting a picture ID is too difficult for minorities. They need them for plenty of other things, such as cashing checks, and they can get them easily enough, but Newsom thinks they can't.
Yet he also wants to make it as difficult as possible to get a concealed carry permit. He was fine with making it virtually impossible for most people to get one at all. This is a constitutionally protected right. He even offers tacit acknowledgment of that fact by offering up his own proposal for a constitutional amendment to codify gun control.
And let's be clear, Newsom is far from alone in this. Plenty of other Democrats view voter IDs as racist but think onerous concealed carry restrictions are great. In fact, they think that Bruen's prohibition against "may issue" laws is some great travesty.
Of course, hypocrisy isn't anything new for anti-gun Democrats, now is it?
