Category: You have to be kidding, right!?!
Gov. Janet Mills’s office referred critical social media posts to the police. The FPC pushed back.
Talk about your thin-skinned politicians! Apparently, it doesn’t take much more than an insult from critics these days to get the governor of Maine to scream for the police.
Since When Is Criticism a Crime?
Back in December, during an interview with a local NBC affiliate about blunders by official in the lead-up to the Lewiston mass shooting, Maine Gov. Janet Mills left the door open to tighter gun restrictions, including a ban on so-called “assault weapons.”
That segment was picked up and publicized by The Maine Wire, a conservative-leaning news site. That outlet’s post, in turn, drew a pungent comment from the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), a pugnacious self-defense rights group that pulls no punches when it comes to defending individual liberty. So, of course the governor’s office went crying to the cops.
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“Documents obtained by the Maine Wire via a Freedom of Access Act show that Gov. Janet Mills’ personnel referred social media posts from the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Maine Wire to the State Police, flagging them for the governor’s Executive Protection Unit,” The Maine Wire‘s Steve Robinson reported last week.
The posts in question were entirely unthreatening, except perhaps to sensitive feelings. The Maine Wire added nothing to the video clip except for a short summary of the content: “Governor Mills is leaving the door open for a possible assault weapons ban following the Lewiston shooting.”
The FPC was, characteristically, a little sharper: “Hey @GovJanetMills, Three words: Fuck you. No.”
That’s short, to the point, and perhaps a bit sharp, but it implies no threats whatsoever.
Nevertheless, The Maine Wire found emails showing that Mills’ press secretary passed a link to the post around the office, and that “another staffer immediately forwarded the post to the Maine State Police employee responsible for protecting the governor.”
According to Robinson, this isn’t the first time officials in the Democrat-led state government have tried to get the outlet in legal hot water. Emails revealed the office of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows questioning if an article illustration depicting a stylized presidential ballot featuring only the Joe Biden–Kamala Harris ticket qualified as a “fake ballot” since it showed the state seal. This happened after Bellows tried to boot Republican Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot.
Part of a Pattern of Weaponized Law
The Maine spat is part of a flurry of cases across the country involving government officials attempting to misuse the legal system and regulatory power to punish political opponents. While not as high-profile or as high-stakes, it’s reminiscent of NRA v. Vullo, a case recently given new life by the U.S. Supreme Court, in which Maria Vullo, the former head of New York’s Department of Financial Services, very clearly used the power of her office over banks and insurance companies to twist their arms until they denied services to the National Rifle Association.
“Six decades ago, this Court held that a government entity’s ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion’ against a third party ‘to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech violates the First Amendment,” Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote for the court in the unanimous opinion. “Today, the Court reaffirms what it said then: Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”
Such coercion came in the form of the abuse of regulatory power over financial institutions in the Vullo case. But it can come as old-school referrals to the police of anybody who criticizes government officials and their policies. Anything like that violates free speech rights.
The Firearms Policy Coalition Fights Back
“The disdain for natural rights by government officials like Maine Governor Mills and Secretary of State Bellows bolsters our commitment to our mission to render them irrelevant,” the FPC responded to the dust-up over the X post referral.
In a July 18 letter to Mills and Bellows, FPC President Brandon Combs vowed, “we take First Amendment-protected rights just as seriously as we do others.”
“You must surely be aware that our X post responding to Governor Mills’s discussion of an immoral ban on protected arms is clearly protected speech as there is absolutely no uncertainty about the law regarding this form of speech. If not, some education is in order,” the letter continued. “Naked authoritarianism, such as efforts to chill free speech, is not acceptable to FPC and our members. We strongly encourage you to learn more about protected speech and arms.”
For what it’s worth, the first letter of each line of the letter, read vertically, spells: “Fuck You No.”
The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
The state police commissioner was copied on the letter. That seems a handy shortcut given the propensity of the governor’s office to share mean messages with the cops. It cuts out the middleman and ensures police get a timely heads-up about sharply worded criticism of government officials.
A Practice That Needs To Stop
The weaponization of law, the courts, regulatory agencies, and tax collectors is despicable, but nothing new. The IRS has been used by presidents at least as far back as Franklin Delano Roosevelt to torment political enemies. Operation Chokepoint put federal regulatory pressure on banks to cut off access to financial services for legal but politically disfavored industries. The practice is extralegal and destructive of whatever remains of respect for government. It’s also becoming increasingly common.
When abusing the power of the state to punish critics becomes the norm, it erases the line between people who have committed actual criminal acts, and those who have just pissed off the powerful. That’s what lands us at the point when the office of a state governor refers insulting social media posts for the state police to do something about.
We’ll discover the hard way what that something is, unless those on the receiving end push back the way the FPC did. That means mocking thin-skinned government officials, calling them out publicly, and taking them to court. Intolerant officials want to hurt their critics with powers that were never meant to be used that way. That can only be discouraged if such abuses come with high costs of their own.
Chiricahua Apache prisoners including Geronimo (front row, third from right). National Archives
In the wake of the 2022 NYSRPA v Bruen decision, gun control laws at all levels in the United States have been in danger. While the original case only applied to “may issue” concealed carry laws, the case opened the door to lawsuits of all kinds by changing the standard by which infringements are to be measured. Instead of being able to hand-wave our constitutionally-protected rights away with interest balancing (“We really, really, really need this law!”), states would instead have to show that an anti-gun law would have been tolerable at the time the Second Amendment was ratified.
The only way to prove this is to look at the history and find not only precedent, but also find that the precedent was overwhelmingly common. One state passing a law, or a few states having a law isn’t really enough. For an anti-gun law to stand, it would have needed to be common practice during the founding era.
Obviously, anti-gun forces aren’t going to give up. Instead of being like, “Damn. You got me. This law is unconstitutional,” we instead see them trying all kinds of crazy things to come up with historical precedent to justify today’s anti-gun laws. In a recent New Mexico case, a federal judge tried again to use laws against slaves owning firearms and laws against Native Americans owning guns to justify it.
In short, their argument is that these laws decided who could get a weapon. So, the thinking goes, a state can now decide who can own a weapon, even if very different criteria are used to make that choice.
Why This Argument Doesn’t Hold Water
One very important thing changed since the time of those bigoted and evil laws: the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
While simply calling a law bigoted and even genocidal doesn’t automatically render it unconstitutional, it’s pretty clear that a law banning black people and Native Americans wouldn’t be constitutional today. Why? Because the Civil War marked the beginning of the end of that nonsense. Constitutional amendments ended slavery and ended treating anyone as a second-class citizen.
This didn’t become the reality on the ground overnight, though. Slavery ended, but a decades-long insurgency ultimately succeeded in ending Reconstruction. This enabled the South to bring milder forms of slavery back via Jim Crow. Native Americans were denied the rights of citizens both during and after the Indian Wars. But, during the 20th Century, governments and courts decided to start following the law and put an end to unconstitutional persecution of these classes of people. Now, things like Jim Crow and treating Native Americans as foreigners with no rights are in the garbage can of history where they belong.
Given that these laws banning these two classes of people from owning weapons wouldn’t be constitutional today, there’s really no sense in relying on them to support infringements on other people. To claim otherwise is to claim that black people and Native Americans could be rightly denied their rights today.
Really, though, the judge who wrote this decision and the other anti-gun lawyers who originally crafted this dumb argument aren’t bigots themselves. They know this is a nonsense argument that won’t prove durable in higher courts. All they’re trying to do is come up with something that looks semi-legitimate to slow the process down in hopes that Democrats can change the composition of the Supreme Court and undo NYSRPA v Bruen, as well as to make a mockery of the Bruen decision in the process.
We shouldn’t let them off the hook, though. Disingenuously using the bigoted past to support their agenda in the present doesn’t make them good guys. If anything, this should be seen as a spit in the face and a mockery of the people who fought so hard to end slavery and the abuse of Native Americans. For this, they should still be ashamed.
