Governor Patrick Wants to Tax Your Civil Rights!

… if you totaled up the labor costs associated with filing police reports for incidents involving firearms, that’d easily add up to $60 million.  That’s just off the top of my head.

You’re proposing we fund our public safety via fees?  

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p>Coming up next: auto safety fees; being a guy fee (you know for domestic violence); being a woman fee (same); Sox win the World Series fee (a surcharge to all tickets to cover the cost of street riots after the game)….

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p>A fee is an implied fee-for-service, to cover costs gun ownership.  If you’re saying divert it to cover public safety then it’s morphed into a tax.

… that its not as hard as you’d think to find $60 million in government spending related to guns.  How you want to arrange the funding is another issue.  

I’m unaware if Massachusetts SJC has weighed in on the difference between a tax and a fee, but other states have:

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p>(1) a user fee is defrays the costs of a regulatory activity or government service, while a tax is designed to raise general revenue;
(2) a user fee must be proportionate to the necessary costs of the service, whereas a tax may not be.

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p>Quacks like a tax…
 

the costs associated with unlicensed firearms, which are irrelevant to the cost being covered by the fee/tax.

First, I think the $60 million number is a little high, as gary used the non-resident figure of $250 versus the resident fee of $200. Second, that $200 is for a 6-year license. So even if that $60 million is right, that’s about $10 million per year. Third, for the gun owner, that’s $33.33 a year and hardly prohibitive. So the guy who owns the gun license fee went up from $16 to $33? I guess that means one fewer case of Coors Light or one fewer large 3-topping pizza delivered per year.

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p>I don’t care necessarily where the gun money goes, because that’s $5-10 mil per year that doesn’t have to come from another part of the budget. I’m also in favor of the idea of using fees as a rationing mechanism to persuade people not to own guns because of the cost, but I’d reiterate that I’m in favor of reducing the fees for people who really want to exercise their 2nd amendment right but where prohibited due to the 16 extra bucks per year.

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p>As for the poll tax, it was repealed in 1963. We could reinstitute it, but good luck to anyone who tries.  

Many liberals, e.g. myself and (more notably) Dan Kennedy,  were strongly against to McCain-Feingold on the basis that it restricts freedom of speech.  

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p>The ACLU also opposes it.

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p>I find the “Conservatives know this” reasoning suspect.  Do you have a cite?

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Campaign finance reform has been McCain’s pet issue for quite awhile; the passage of McCain Feingold was a major victory for him.

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p>In the legal challenge to the law, it was substantially weakened by an opinion authored by Roberts and Alito.  Indeed, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas wanted to overturn McCain Feingold in its entirety; Roberts and Alito refused only for reasons of judicial minimalism, which doesn’t bode well for the statute in the long run.

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p>Here is McCain telling the Federalist Society how much he loves Roberts and Alito, and would appoint more like them.

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p>I can no longer find the comment thread in which this assertion was broadly disbelieved.  The problem is that the judicial philosophy that can accept McCain Feingold is closely correlated with the judicial philosophy that accepts Griswold, Roe, and other similar controversial rulings that get conservatives agitated.

I disagree that they’re similar judicial philosophies.  McCain/Feingold restricts freedom.  Griswold and Roe remove restrictions.  I agree that the latter two bug modern SOCIAL conservatives, but also believe they’re latching on to judicial minimalism is just a flag of convenience.  

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p>Again, I see campaign finance reform as party neutral, so would love evidence to the contrary, even if just to satisfy my own morbid curiosity.

In the conservative view, whether policy X enhances freedom or restricts it is entirely irrelevant to the discussion of the constitutional validity of the policy.  The Constitution permits the federal government to do only certain specific things, and restricts the federal government from doing certain specific other things, some of which are also restrictions imposed on state governments.

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p>Griswold and Roe have to be discovered in the penumbras and emanations of the Bill of Rights, which is a fancy way of saying they were made up out of whole cloth on policy grounds.  In other words, the Constitution restricts government from doing not just certain specific thinsg, but some other things that know one knows about until they are “discovered” by some enterprising law professor.  They have nothing whatsoever to do with the specific things that are right there in the paper; rather they have to be found though some process that would confuse Jacques Derrida.

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p>The same “fuzzy math” approach is required to find that a classic and clear infringement on political expression, isn’t.

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p>Thus: Justices Scalia and Thomas have thus far lined up pretty consistently opposed to the penumbras an emanations, and opposed to classic and clear restrictions on political speech, whether in the form of participating in a campaign or burning a flag.  I expect Roberts and Alito to line up similarly on both issues, which is why liberals were opposed to their confirmation.

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p>To put it another way, it is very unlikely that a candidate for appointment to the Court is both acceptable to conservatives, and in disagreement with Mitch McConnell on the campaign finance issue.