Michigan voters have no illusions: By a huge margin, they don’t want people to be allowed to bring guns to their polling places, because they are well aware that the intention of packing a weapon to a place where people are voting is simple and clear intimidation. This apparently does not matter to Michigan’s Republican-dominated judiciary.
A Detroit News poll released this week shows that 73% of the state’s voters believe openly carried guns should be banned from polling places, including a majority of Republicans. Nonetheless, a state judge ruled Tuesday that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s directive implementing such a ban was illegal, and on Friday a state appeals court upheld the ruling.
Benson’s directive was already controversial. As soon as she issued it October 19, pro-gun groups had threatened to file suit, and did so—to which this week’s rulings came in response. Some rural sheriffs had similarly vowed not to enforce it, leading Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to vow that she would send state patrol officers to enforce the rule in precincts where local law enforcement resisted.
In making his initial ruling, Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher Murray issued a preliminary injunction suspending enforcement of Benson’s directive. Murray concluded that the edict required being subject to state rule-making processes, which it circumvents. Besides, he contended, current state law already protects voters from intimidation.
Laws passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor "already provide law enforcement with the tools to stop those whose goal it would be to intimidate voters, whether with or without a firearm," Murray wrote.
In upholding Murray’s ruling Thursday, a three-member panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals—comprised entirely of Republican appointees—followed the same logic.
"Accordingly, anyone who intimidates a voter in Michigan by brandishing a firearm (or, for that matter, by threatening with a knife, baseball bat, fist, or otherwise menacing behavior) is committing a felony under existing law, and that law is — and remains — enforceable by our executive branch as well as local law enforcement," Court of Claims Judge Patrick Meter wrote.
The Detroit Free Press reported that Nessel filed an emergency appeal with the Michigan Supreme Court Thursday night. "The merits of this issue—which impacts all Michiganders—deserves full and expedited consideration by our state’s highest court,” Nessel spokesman Ryanend nu Jarvi said.
The Detroit News poll found broad support for open-carry bans at both polling places and at the state capitol grounds in Lansing. In addition to 73% approval for a ban on open carry at voting locations (with 22% disapproving), a majority of Republicans and an overwhelming majority of Democrats supported the ban. Some 67% of gun-owning voters agreed.
Similarly asked if guns should be banned on the capitol grounds, 76% of voters said they should; only 18% disagreed. About 53% of self-labeled "strong Republicans” supported a capitol-grounds gun ban, as did 95% of strong Democrats and 72% of independents.
Banning guns at the capitol became a hot topic of discussion in Michigan this year primarily because of a late-April demonstration against COVID-19 restrictions in which the state House of Representatives came under siege from armed miltia-style protesters, resulting in a shutdown of proceedings. That and succeeding demonstrations were notable not just for their bristling arms and shows of intimidation, but for the extraordinarily violent rhetoric against Whitmer and other state officials that was bandied about freely before, during, and after them.
That rhetoric became directly connected to the arrests two weeks ago of 14 Michigan militiamen—some of whom had participated in the anti-Whitmer protests—for plotting to kidnap the governor at her summer house, put her on “trial” before a “citizens court,” and then execute her. Indeed, Michigan Republicans have struggled to come to grips with the recognition of their own role in fomenting the violent talk, including at least one of the same sheriffs who had indicated he will refuse to enforce the open-carry ban at polling places.
The state’s Republican-dominated judiciary (including the state Supreme Court, dimming the prospects for Nessel’s appeal) seems not to even recognize that the open display of guns itself can be a kind of intimidation, and that moreover their presence in a place where people are voting is not just absurdly unnecessary but a potential threat both to public safety and the larger right of the public to vote securely and safely—and that those rights far outweigh someone’s need to tote a weapon into every damned venue.
But that’s today’s Republican mindset: Screw ordinary people, never mind public safety, just feed the base their red meat and own the libs. Even if it means people perish along the way.
Source: Daily Kos
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