The Brewing Thompson-Giuliani Battle Over Rights

Political operatives within the Giuliani campaign have decided to go on the offensive concerning the Mayor's record while Chief Executive for NYC. Giuliani has taken a beating of late from his Republican competitors concerning the style and substance of the Giuliani administration.

Several items of interest have come to the surface concerning Giuliani's years as Mayor, including charges that he was a 'little dictator' and tended to be rather callous toward some individual rights.

Giuliani, of course, successfully trampled upon the citizens' right to bear arms in his crusade to reign in the city's horrible crime problem. Apparently the fact that Giuliani's anti-crime crusade was successful in drastically reducing the amount of violent crime within the city has led some to believe that the ends justify the means, i.e., that if robbing law-abiding citizens of their rights results in a drastic reduction in crime, then fine and dandy.

This would seem to be the tactic employed by the Giuliani campaign to attempt to short-circuit the widespread criticism of the Mayor's record on Constitutional rights--show how successfully he was able to reduce violent crime and make the city safer.

Interestingly, one of the main targets of the new Giuliani offensive is none other than unannounced GOP candidate Fred Thompson.

Obviously Thompson's consistent and strong support for Second Amendment rights, and his harsh criticism of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's aggressive pursuit of out-of-state gun dealers that operate entirely within the laws of their own particular states, are simply too much for the Giuliani campaign to ignore.

Giuliani's political operatives used Thompson's criticism of Bloomberg to go on the offensive concerning former Mayor Giuliani's record...and to launch an attack on Thompson for suggesting that Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani have been wrong to mount an assault on a Constitutional right in order to fight crime.

As a long-time attorney who knows the ins and outs of Constitutional law, Thompson has been highly critical of Bloomberg's use of the Courts in the state of New York to sue out of state gun dealers over the fact that some of their products wound up on the streets of the Big Apple and were used in committing crimes.

Taking Bloomberg's logic at face value, one wonders why, for example, the Mayor has not also initiated lawsuits against, say, whiskey manufacturers in Tennessee and Kentucky due to the deaths of citizens at the hands of drunk drivers who consumed out of state whiskey.

Apparently the Giuliani campaign felt that Thompson's criticism of Bloomberg was a foreshadowing of things to come, when Thompson would launch into a major attack against Giuliani for his assault on Second Amendment rights in the city when he was Mayor.

Thus, the Giuliani campaign went on the offensive, attempting to make the case that under the circumstances, i.e., high crime in New York City, the Mayor was justified in attacking Constitutional rights. Obviously Giuliani also believes that the present Bloomberg power-grab, trampling all over the boundaries of jurisdictions and separation of powers, is a proper response to gun violence at the hands of lawless thugs.

The glaring question that arises is that, given Giuliani's rationale for either weakening or suspending Constitutional rights in special situations, how, then, would he respond to a critical national emergency, such as a category 5 hurricane directly hitting the northeastern corridor from NYC to Boston, which is a mega-population center?

More critically, how would Giuliani respond to a terrorist attack, such as a dirty bomb erupting in a major metropolitan area?

Would he, as President, declare Martial Law? And if so, would that include confiscation of firearms?

After all, this is precisely what the government did in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Innocent, defenseless citizens were forced to turn over their guns, even as looting and mayhem erupted, and even as the government failed to come to the aid of its citizens, at the local, state, and national levels.

If Giuliani could so easily discard Second Amendment rights in a 'special situation' such as NYC's crime problem, then how much more easily would he discard that Amendment, and other Amendments, such as freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, in the event of a major national emergency?

These questions are of no insignificant import, for the answers go directly to the heart of the nature of the United States of America as envisioned by the Framers in the Constitution.

The Framers insisted on the Second Amendment precisely because they considered the possibility of such major national emergencies. They wanted the individual citizens to be able to defend themselves against tyranny of any kind, such as the suspension of rights during a national emergency.

To the Framers this was the ultimate national emergency. Governments that sought to rob the citizens of the rights protected in the Constitution were considered to be tyrannical, and that included our own government.

In other words, if the rights delineated in the Constitution are no good in a national emergency, then the entire rationale for including the protection of those rights in the Constitution is rendered null and void. Why protect rights at all if they can simply be suspended at the very moment they are needed the most?

The fact of the matter is that all of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were specified precisely due to the possibility of major national emergencies. The Framers fought for these rights squarely in the middle of a major national emergency when the very future of the young, fledgling Republic was at stake, the point being that if rights are no longer valid at the precise point when they are needed the most, then what good are they?

And it is for this reason that Rudy Giuliani is highly vulnerable on the subject of Constitutional rights and Fred Thompson appears to be the man who can take him on and rip to shreds the Giuliani/Bloomberg notion that rights are expendable in 'special situations.'