Given that president Obama and the other government leaders are still in office today, we can assume that Operation American Spring over the weekend was a total bust. Even though the weather improved, it appears that at most about 300 to 400 people showed up. Dennis Lynch has a report and photographs of the non-event.
But the organizers are undaunted.
The rally started Friday but organizers vowed to “remain [in Washington D.C.] until acceptable solutions are gained.” What are some of these solutions? The main goal of Operation American Spring is the “restoration of our Ninth and Tenth Amendment laws to full force.”
What are those amendments? The Ninth says that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” while the Tenth says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”, reflecting the view of these people that the federal government has encroached on the rights of states and individuals.
This is what was behind the 50 or so people who last week rode their ATV’s into an area in Utah that had been prohibited by the federal Bureau of Land Management to such vehicles. The BLM did not try to stop them, theough they were there.
About 30 deputies and a handful of U.S. Bureau of Land Management law enforcement personnel watched as protesters drove past a closure sign and down the canyon located about 300 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, the protest’s organizer, has said it was designed to show that the federal agency isn’t the “supreme authority” and local residents have a right to have their opinions heard.
…BLM officers recorded and documented protesters who traveled into the closure area, Palma added.
The agency warned riders all week to stay out, vowing prosecution against those who ignore a law put in place in 2007 after an illegal trail was found that cuts through the ancestral ruins. The canyon is open to hikers and horseback riders.
According to Phase 2 of their plan, the OAS people now plan to stay in DC until they achieve their goals of removing the government leadership, whereupon they will unleash Phase 3 where they will create tribunals to investigate the current leadership and charge them with crimes.
The catch with all these plans is that they seem to involve a lot of standing around doing nothing for an indefinite period. Even if you are only parading around holding signs and making speeches, it still requires money, so it will not be long before, like with the supporters of Cliven Bundy, we get appeals for financial contributions.
Tribunals?! Now, see, the death panels finally appear!
Is the emphasis on states’ rights and individual rights a code for “our right as christians to oppress people” or something like that?
Phase 2 sounds an awful lot like “?”. So phase 3 should be “Profit!”. Money issue solved.
I was wondering about why they’re waving the Ninth Amendment around, so I Wikipeiaed it. One of the interesting things that I found out was that the court held in Roe v. Wade that one of “unenumerated rights” of the ninth that the government wasn’t allowed to take away was the right of bodily autonomy — in other words, the right to have an abortion. So should we tell these people that stronger ninth amendment enforcement means they’re pro-abortion? Wonder if that would make their heads explode?
Ah, good. Something the Teabaggers are eminently qualified for.
“a total bust”
MS, you’re too generous. Dutch has the appropriate expression: a storm in a glass of water.
@4
I think the crazies take the Ninth Amendment very differently than normal people tend to look at it. I discussed with one conservative who basically it claimed it gave a “right to discriminate.” Like because an employee chooses their employer (based on any criteria), employers implicitly have the same right against employees. Like he basically defined a bunch of things as “natural rights” and they were rights that he liked.
When I pointed out that rights to health, safety, food, and bodily autonomy were far more natural than, say, due process or privacy, he turned around and said that of course there were non-natural rights but they had to be explicit. Which, of course, directly contradicts the Ninth Amendment.
So then he just non-sequitured out of the topic.