To think that the average American can parse their prose is amusing.

As far as Navarro goes, he’s good at making shit up too:

“Navarro admitted the Chronicle of Higher Education Tuesday that Vara, who he quotes extensively across his many books, is actually his alter ego. “Ron Vara” is an anagram of “Navarro.””

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-collected-wisdom-of-peter-navarros-fake-stock-market-guru-ron-vara

Scary, actually.

The Federalist Papers are them arguing, not the law.

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation,” Madison wrote, “the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.” By “simple,” Madison meant a unitary government, such as France, as opposed to the US Constitution’s system of dividing sovereignty between the federal government and the states.

Madison was following a long tradition in Western Christian thought that the best leaders of resistance to tyranny were “intermediate magistrates” — such as local governments and their officials.

The founders rejected the notion that individuals or some group could use armed force just because they did not like a particular law. In fact, they believed quite the opposite: The Constitution specifically empowers Congress “[t]o provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” The power was first exercised during the presidencies of George Washington and John Adams, when the federal government called forth state militias to suppress insurrections known as the Whiskey Rebellion (in western Pennsylvania) and Fries’s Rebellion (in eastern Pennsylvania). Both insurrections had grown out of anti-tax protests, in which mobs crossed the line by using armed force.

Yes the Second Amendment DOES give the armed citizen the moral and philosophical right to overthrow a tyrannical government, providing he is part of a “well regulated militia” with the authority of some local magistrate or legislature. That is what the constitution says, before the Conservative-stacked Supreme Court decided any Racist Right Wing Redneck Peckerhead who could afford a military small arm had the obligation to do so.

Of, course, that means the Confederacy had a moral and political right to secede from the Union, technically, but that’s an argument for another day.

But most important, what the Founders believed or wrote or thought or argued is NOT, NOT, NOT the Constitution. The Federalist Papers is a group of political opinions, some of them even contradict one another. We are governed by the political philosophy they all managed to later agree on and vote for: the Constitution. It is an ambiguous collection of compromises and vague language, deliberately. There was a lot of unfinished business and unresolved issues when the Constitution was adopted, and they were very well aware it. Conservatives love to use the Federalist Papers as “evidence” and justification of what they would like to be done is right. It is not. The Papers are a collection of brilliant political philosophy but it carries no legal or statutory weight. The Federalists wrote a textbook. The Constitution is the Law.

I respect the wisdom of the founders, they were remarkable men for the 18th century; merchants, planters, soldiers, lawyers, ministers. And not a bloody aristocrat in the bunch! They were educated, intellectuals, but they were also men of action, men of letters. But they did not all agree on everything. And many of them owned slaves, the most obscene sin of all.

And I apologize if I went a bit hyperbolic myself.

https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1532776813692342272