I hate to swim against the tide, but several years ago I took an interest in the subject of militias in the Constitution. And after a lot of reading and listening to arguments, I came to believe that the militia clause in the 2nd Amendment, however badly worded, should not be construed to mean that only active members of the state militias (now the National Guard) had a right to own firearms. Rather, I think it’s more likely the Second Amendment protected the right of individuals to own firearms so that the state militias could not be disarmed by the federal government. I know that doesn’t make much sense now, but I can see how 18th century men might have seen it that way.

The original state militias were compulsory, meaning all eligible men were required to register. They were also often self-armed, and federal regulations passed by the original Congress stipulated what sort of musket the registered militia members were supposed to maintain. In reality these regulations were not followed all that well. Some states took their militias seriously and some let them go to rot. There are all kinds of stories of men drilling with broomsticks and cornstalks instead of muskets because they didn’t own muskets. Militias tended not to be very good at actual warfare. However, in the early 19th century drilling competitions between militia units were a popular spectator sport.

Anyway, long story short, the way the original state militias were conceived, the ability of citizens to purchase and possess firearms was essential if the state militia was going to be armed.

I haven’t read the Heller decision myself, so I don’t know how the majority of the court argued it.

Following up yesterday’s post on possible Hatch Act violations by the White House — John Solomon, Alec MacGillis and Sarah Cohen provide more details in today’s Washington Post. Karl Rove, they write, enlisted “political appointees at every level of government in a permanent campaign that was an integral part of his strategy to establish Republican electoral dominance.”

Thirteen months before President Bush was reelected, chief strategist Karl Rove summoned political appointees from around the government to the Old Executive Office Building. The subject of the Oct. 1, 2003, meeting was “asset deployment,” and the message was clear:

The staging of official announcements, high-visibility trips and declarations of federal grants had to be carefully coordinated with the White House political affairs office to ensure the maximum promotion of Bush’s reelection agenda and the Republicans in Congress who supported him, according to documents and some of those involved in the effort.

“The White House determines which members need visits,” said an internal e-mail about the previously undisclosed Rove “deployment” team, “and where we need to be strategically placing our assets.” …

… Under Rove’s direction, this highly coordinated effort to leverage the government for political marketing started as soon as Bush took office in 2001 and continued through last year’s congressional elections, when it played out in its most quintessential form in the coastal Connecticut district of Rep. Christopher Shays, an endangered Republican incumbent. Seven times, senior administration officials visited Shays’s district in the six months before the election — once for an announcement as minor as a single $23 government weather alert radio presented to an elementary school. On Election Day, Shays was the only Republican House member in New England to survive the Democratic victory.

Apparently the administration officials on these trips didn’t make campaign appearances with the GOP candidates. However, these appearances were hardly apolitical.

In practical terms, that meant Cabinet officials concentrated their official government travel on the media markets Rove’s team chose, rolling out grant decisions made by agencies with red-carpet fanfare in GOP congressional districts, and carefully crafted announcements highlighting the release of federal money in battleground states.

Further,

… the scale of Rove’s effort is far broader than previously revealed; they say that Rove’s team gave more than 100 such briefings during the seven years of the Bush administration. The political sessions touched nearly all of the Cabinet departments and a handful of smaller agencies that often had major roles in providing grants, such as the White House office of drug policy and the State Department’s Agency for International Development.

As I understand it — note that I’m not an expert — the grants themselves were not a violation of the Hatch Act if the “team” was only making announcements and not meddling with the allocations themselves. The question is, did Bush appointees make grant decisions based on the White House’ political goals?

“What we are seeing is the tip of a whole effort to make the federal government a subsidiary of the Republican Party. It was all politics, all the time,” Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight committee, said last week.

There is no question there was tight coordination of campaigns and grant allocations —

Shays wrote Bush on Sept. 8, 2006, to seek the early release — before the election — of heating assistance money for low-income residents in his state. Just four days later, the White House released $6 million. Asked to comment on the administration’s help, Shays’s campaign manager Michael Sohn said, “Chris was grateful to be returned to office based on his record of hard work and accomplishment.”

Were the grant decisions made for political expedience? A WaPo analysis of 2004 Department of Health and Human Services grants for community health and disease-prevention programs showed that

[H]alf the awards went to targeted election states or congressional districts, the rest to noncompetitive areas that included Democratic strongholds.

The agency’s news release about those grants, however, detailed at the top just four recipients — in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and an Oklahoma congressional district — that Rove’s team identified in earlier 2004 briefings as key to the GOP’s reelection strategy.

I would argue that while these grants may not have been politically tainted, taxpayer monies were being used to pay someone in the agency to write GOP campaign press releases. I’d also like to see how much taxpayer money was used to pay for all that travel.

Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao made 13 official visits in the last two months of the election, never straying more than 50 miles from the media markets on Rove’s office list, the analysis showed. That August, she attended three local Fraternal Order of Police meetings in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan to tout new overtime rules that would soon go into effect. Likewise, she traveled to Tampa — another targeted media market — to announce grants for recipients who actually lived in Jacksonville, Fla., a less competitive area.

Aside from her home town of Denver, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton visited just five cities in the first two months of 2004, according to the public announcements. But that pace changed between June and November, when — in visits to 37 cities — she hit the target election markets 32 times, the announcements show.

The White House probably will argue that as long as the officials didn’t specifically endorse candidates, these were not really “campaign” trips. On the other hand …

Those visits occurred after Interior liaison William Kloiber wrote to White House political affairs aide Matt Schlapp to thank him for a briefing about the political landscape. In an e-mail obtained by congressional investigators, Kloiber wrote, “Sometimes these folks need to be reminded who they work for and how their geographic travel can benefit the President.“[emphasis added]

Um, Mr. Kloiber? Who do you work for?

Let’s go back to grant allocation. The White House claims that Karl avoided meddling in “grant and contract decisions made by career government employees.” But more and more of those “career government employees” were hand-picked for their political loyalties.

And can we say “Department of Homeland Security”? In the spring of election year 2004, we learned that DHS was not exactly allocating grant money according to risk.

Of the top 10 states and districts receiving the most money per capita last year, only the District of Columbia also appeared on a list of the top 10 most at-risk places, as calculated by AIR for TIME. In fact, funding appears to be almost inversely proportional to risk.

If all the federal homeland-security grants from last year are added together, Wyoming received $61 a person while California got just $14, according to data gathered at TIME’s request by the Public Policy Institute of California, an independent, nonprofit research organization. Alaska received an impressive $58 a resident, while New York got less than $25. On and on goes the upside-down math of the new homeland-security funding.

There was much chest-thumping and vows to do better, but in the spring of election year 2006 we learned that New York City has no landmarks worth protecting.

Instead, the department’s database of vulnerable critical infrastructure and key resources included the Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo near Huntsville, Ala., a bourbon festival, a bean festival and the Kangaroo Conservation Center in Dawsonville, Ga. …

… [T]he Homeland Security assessment of New York this year failed to include Times Square, the Empire State Building the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty as a national icon or monument.

Someone might want to revisit the DHS grant issue. When New York City howled about its reduced DHS money in 1996, Michael Chertoff said it was New York’s own fault for not filing their proposals properly. Jen Chung wrote at The Gothamist (June 2, 2006; emphasis added):

As New York state and city politicians attack the Department of Homeland Security over cutting the funds NYC gets for anti-terrorism efforts, the DHS has been fighting back by saying that New York City’s proposal wasn’t well-prepared. The NY Times writes, “Federal officials said yesterday that the city had not only done a poor job of articulating its needs in its application, but had also mishandled the application itself, failing to file it electronically as required, instead faxing its request to Washington.” Ha! NY state and city officials say that, in fact, they did electronically submit the application – but you know that there’s probably sniping about so-and-so’s aide or intern screwing things up. But In fact, NYC, though in the “top 25% of urban areas at risk,” was rated in the bottom 25% for the “quality of its application”! Our politicians, though, are saying that the DHS directed money to cities where reelections were coming up in the fall. The Daily News has a feature on Tracy Henske, the DHS official who “signed off on the cuts” – she’s from Missouri and Missouri cities got increases in funding!

Jen Chung linked to a New York Post article that is no longer online. This deserves further investigation, I say.

First, the cartoons.

[Update: Hat tip to erinyes — ya gotta see the FKN Newz Roundup.]

The scandal preview is provided by Marisa Taylor and Kevin G. Hall of McClatchy Newspapers, who write:

Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.

If these political appointees spent taxpayer money to benefit candidates, it would be a violation of the Hatch Act.

During the briefings at Treasury and Commerce, then-Bush administration political director Ken Mehlman and other White House aides detailed competitive congressional districts, battleground election states and key media markets and outlined GOP strategy for getting out the vote.

Commerce and Treasury political appointees later made numerous public appearances and grant announcements that often correlated with GOP interests, according to a review of the events by McClatchy Newspapers. The pattern raises the possibility that the events were arranged with the White House’s political guidance in mind.

I like the next part:

One congressional aide, who asked to remain anonymous, said the investigation was revealing “a number of remarkable coincidences” similar to how Treasury and Commerce events appeared to coincide with the strategy in the political briefings. However, it remains to be seen whether the subsequent department actions were intentional, said the aide, who asked not to be named because the investigation is ongoing.

Remarkable, yes. This is a remarkable administration. I assume the White House will stand by the “coincidence” story. And I assume one would need some documentation that proves intent. Further, I assume most of such documentation has already been shredded.

I also assume that, even as I keyboard, all manner of operatives and sympathizers are going through Clinton Administration records to find similar “coincidences” to prepare their usual fallback defense — Clinton did it, too. However, a former Clinton Administration Treasury official is quoted as saying nothing remotely like that happened in the Clinton years. “I never experienced anything like that. The notion that the White House would be holding meetings with Treasury appointees just didn’t fit.”

As part of the probe, committee investigators found that White House drug czar John Walters took 20 trips at taxpayers’ expense in 2006 to appear with Republican congressional candidates.

Remarkable coincidences, huh?

In a separate investigation, the independent Office of Special Counsel concluded that GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan violated the Hatch Act, which limits the political activities of government employees. Witnesses told investigators that Doan asked at the end of one political briefing in January 2007 what her agency could do to help GOP candidates. Doan has said she doesn’t recall that remark.

Violations of the Hatch Act are treated as administrative, not criminal, matters, and punishment for violations ranges from suspension to termination. The administration has not taken any action against Doan.

And, of course, it won’t, because as long as the administration doesn’t punish anyone they can pretend it never happened. Democrats in Congress are just witch hunting.

In the months leading up to the 2002 election, then-Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Bush’s former campaign finance chairman, made eight appearances or announcements with Republican incumbents in districts deemed by White House aides either as competitive districts or battleground presidential states.

During the stops, he doled out millions of dollars in grants, including in two public announcements with Rep. Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican in a competitive district.

That Heather Wilson is a busy girl.

Taylor and Hall describes several more remarkable coincidences involving Treasury officials, then say,

Bush’s first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, stuck mainly to giving speeches praising President Bush’s economic policies rather than appearing with candidates. O’Neill was unceremoniously dumped after disagreeing repeatedly with the White House.

Was O’Neill asked to take part in some coincidences before he was dumped?

The briefings are part of the legacy of White House political adviser Karl Rove, who announced this week that he’s stepping down at the end of the month to spend more time with his family.

Digby speculates that the Hatch Act investigations might have been the real reason Rove decided to spend more time with his family. She reminds us that fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who filed a Hatch Act complaint against Rove, said —

I believe if OSC digs in, they can get direct evidence. …

… [T]he Justice Department papers everything. I mean, the most minute issue has an incredible researched and memoed product. There has to be a paper trail. I haven’t seen it yet. If it’s not at the Justice Department, it has got to be at the White House.

The White House will, of course, claim executive privilege. But that takes us into a whole new rant, so I believe I will stop here.