Redstate

Posted at 9:30am on Jul. 10, 2008 Gun Grabbers, Post-DC v. Heller - Alert!

By kowalski

When the Supreme Court rendered its decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller overturning the Washington D.C. gun ban and protecting the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, opponents of the ruling were were quick to buoy themselves upon the closely divided 5-4 aspect of the decision. Many of them opined that even though the ruling seemed like a temporary setback for the gun grabbers, it could have "legislative benefits" down the road and serve to rally anti-gun forces throughout the country.

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Posted at 11:12pm on Jul. 8, 2008 Rethinking War Powers

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

The 1973 War Powers Act has been the object of much political and legal derision--especially given the widespread belief that the Act is unconstitutional as written. The political derision stems from the fact that Presidents have not invoked the Act and Congresses have done nothing to call for the Act's enforcement.

This state of affairs has prompted the creation of a bipartisan commission--the National War Powers Commission--tasked with the assignment to replace the War Powers Act with something that would be more workable. The Commission is chaired by former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher. This Commission is not a creation of Congress the way the Iraq Study Group was, but rather a creation of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs (note the language on the homepage stating that "[t]he Miller Center impaneled the National War Powers Commission in February 2007."). Secretaries Baker and Christopher co-wrote an editorial that appeared in today's New York Times and which spells out how a new legislative design would function in governing the exercise of war powers by both Congress and the President:

Our proposed statute would provide that the president must consult with Congress before ordering a "significant armed conflict" -- defined as combat operations that last or are expected to last more than a week. To provide more clarity than the 1973 War Powers Resolution, our statute also defines what types of hostilities would not be considered significant armed conflicts -- for example, training exercises, covert operations or missions to protect and rescue Americans abroad. If secrecy or other circumstances precluded prior consultation, then consultation -- not just notification -- would need to be undertaken within three days.

To guarantee that the president consults with a cross section of Congress, the act would create a joint Congressional committee made up of the leaders of the House and the Senate as well as the chairmen and ranking members of key committees. These are the members of Congress with whom the president would need to personally consult. Almost as important, the act would establish a permanent, bipartisan staff with access to all relevant intelligence and national-security information.

Congress would have obligations, too. Unless it declared war or otherwise expressly authorized a conflict, it would have to vote within 30 days on a resolution of approval. If the resolution of approval was defeated in either House, any member of Congress could propose a resolution of disapproval. Such a resolution would have the force of law, however, only if it were passed by both houses and signed by the president or the president's veto were overridden. If the resolution of disapproval did not survive the president's veto, Congress could express its opposition by, for example, using its internal rules to block future spending on the conflict.

Read on . . .

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Posted at 1:14pm on Jul. 3, 2008 Firing Back at King Richard (in Self-Defense)

By Dan Proft

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has chosen to make the gun issue personal. Okay, I'll bite.

Daley's reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling last week (D.C. v. Heller) overturning the Washington, D.C. ban on gun ownership was as predictable as it was incoherent.

In one of his signature assaults on logic, Daley, a known enemy of modern contrivances like "facts", deftly managed to completely mischaracterize the Court's holding at the same time as embarrassing the faculty at DePaul University School of Law where he somehow obtained a law degree.

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Posted at 10:35am on Jul. 3, 2008 Question

By Erick

In 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the 5-4 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School.

Justice O'Connor wrote, "Race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

If the decision were issued today, no doubt the Supreme Court would have struck down Grutter. O'Connor was replaced by Alito and Roberts took Rehnquist's spot. Kennedy had sided with Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas in the minority.

It has not been twenty-five years since Grutter, just five years. But in those five years we have seen the first American-American Presidential nominee for the largest political party in the nation, which also happens to be the same party that historically has been most antagonist to minorities: on the losing side of the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights era. It was Senator Obama's political party that implemented Jim Crow laws and that tried to filibuster all major civil rights legislation of the twentieth century.

With Barack Obama's ascendency, are racial preferences still needed? Has affirmative action finally out lived its usefulness? If not now, what about next year if Barack Obama becomes President?

I suspect the history Barack Obama is making will give Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy a second bite at the affirmative action apple.

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Posted at 11:54pm on Jul. 2, 2008 Barack Obama's Toothless Second Amendment

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

Jacob Sullum discusses. It's clear that Obama would have preferred D.C.'s tremendously onerous gun ban to remain in effect and if he becomes President, he will do whatever he can legislatively to restrict the right to keep and bear arms.

He'll also try to appoint people to the Supreme Court who would be willing to reverse or severely limit the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller. On this issue, it's important to turn the mike over to Robert Levy, who successfully litigated Heller:

Heller is merely the opening salvo in a series of litigations that will ultimately resolve what weapons and persons can be regulated and what restrictions are permissible. Near term, the Court will also have to decide whether Second Amendment rights can be enforced against state and local governments. Despite those remaining hurdles, it's fair to say that the court's blockbuster decision makes the prospects for reviving the original meaning of the Second Amendment substantially brighter. And given the unfolding presidential contest, it's also fair to say that the court's razor-thin majority conveys a crucial message: Judicial nominations matter.

Yes they do. And by extension, elections matter.

Posted in Barack Obama | Law | Second Amendment — Comments (2)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:55am on Jul. 1, 2008 Atlanta Disarms Public "to make them safer"

By LanceKates

Georgia has a new law that took affect at midnight, allowing citizens with a concealed carry permit to carry in public transportation places like the MARTA or in other places like airport terminals (not past or at security checkpoints, obviously)

The City of Atlanta, specifically officials at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, doesn’t like the law. So they are going to operate in violation of it.

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Posted at 10:42pm on Jun. 29, 2008 Judicial "Pledges Of Centrism"

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

Note that only conservative Justices are accused of quasi-intellectual dishonesty. For whatever reason, I don't think that this is a coincidence and for whatever reason, I don't quite think the implication of dishonesty is itself honest.

Posted at 10:22am on Jun. 29, 2008 Government Officials Vow to Restrict Free Speech and the Right to Assemble

By The Gadfly

Following a historic Supreme Court ruling, Washington DC Mayor Anthony Fenton held forth

As mayor, although I'm disappointed in the court's ruling ... it is important to both respect the court's authority and then to act quickly.”

Police Chief Cathy Lanier said

We want to keep the number of public demonstration opportunities in the District to a minimum, but we're going to follow through and respect the decision of the courts.

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Posted at 12:30pm on Jun. 28, 2008 Tallahassee Dem. Newspaper: Big Brother Should Track Guns With GPS

By Warner Todd Huston

She thinks she has lit upon a "responsible idea" to regulate guns. The idea Megan Kristen Lewis of the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat thinks is "responsible" is to put global positioning tracking devices (GPS) in every gun. That way the government could track down your firearm if it is "stolen" or used in a crime.

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Posted at 12:30am on Jun. 28, 2008 Post-Heller

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

What comes next now that the Supreme Court has handed down its ruling in Heller? Professor Randy Barnett has a good editorial that lays out the nature of the legal fights ahead:

Two important practical issues remain. First, will this ruling also apply to states and municipalities? That will depend on whether the Supreme Court decides to "incorporate" the right to keep and bear arms into the 14th Amendment. But in the middle of his opinion Justice Scalia acknowledges that the 39th Congress that enacted the 14th Amendment did so, in part, to protect the individual right to arms of freedmen and Southern Republicans so they might defend themselves from violence.

My prediction: This ruling will eventually be extended to the states.

Second, how will the court deal with firearms regulations that fall short of a ban? The majority opinion strongly suggests that such regulations must now be subjected to meaningful judicial scrutiny. The exact nature of this scrutiny is not clear, but Justice Scalia explicitly rejects the extremely deferential "rationality" review advocated by Justice Stephen Breyer.

Most likely, gun laws will receive the same sort of judicial scrutiny that is now used to evaluate "time, place and manner" regulations of speech and assembly. Such regulations of First Amendment freedoms are today upheld if they are narrowly tailored to achieve a truly important government purpose, but not if they are really a pretext for undermining protected liberties.

My prediction? Because gun-rights groups like the NRA have so successfully prevented enactment of unreasonable gun laws, most existing gun regulations falling short of a ban will eventually be upheld. But more extreme or merely symbolic laws that are sometimes proposed - whose aim is to impose an "undue burden" by raising the cost of gun production, ownership and sale - would likely be found unconstitutional. All gun regulations - for example, safe storage laws and licensing - will have to be shown to be consistent with an effective right of self-defense by law-abiding citizens.

If any of these things happen, then Heller's status as a truly consequential ruling will only be emphasized, of course.

Read on . . .

Posted in D.C. v. Heller | Law | The Second Amendment — Comments (4)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 12:14am on Jun. 28, 2008 Victory for South Dakota In Informing Women About Abortion

Science 1, Planned Parenthood 0

By Dan McLaughlin

The full en banc 8th Circuit Court of Appeals handed a victory Friday to GOP Gov. Mike Rounds and the people of South Dakota, lifting an injunction sought by Planned Parenthood against a South Dakota statute that mandates disclosures to women seeking abortions about the consequences of their decisions, including disclosure of the fact that an "abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." In no other area of the law is the Left so dedicated to preventing the full disclosure of facts to consumers. The 8th Circuit opinion, written by George W. Bush appointee Judge Raymond Gruender and joined by five other of President Bush's appointees to the bench, recognized Planned Parenthood's opposition to the disclosure of scientifically accurate facts for what it was.

Read On...

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Posted at 8:15pm on Jun. 27, 2008 Two editorials from The New York Times

By Dana R Pico

Thanks to Brian, I saw this editorial from The New York Times:

Lock and Load

Thirty-thousand Americans are killed by guns every year — on the job, walking to school, at the shopping mall. The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly with its wrongheaded and dangerous ruling striking down key parts of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law.

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Posted at 11:42am on Jun. 27, 2008 WaPo: Scalia Says 'Hear, Hear' to Machine Guns in D.C.?

By Warner Todd Huston

It didn't take long for the Washington Post to weigh in on the wrong side of the Second Amendment issue, did it? The Post's Colbert I. King could not contain the disgust he feels for at least one part of the Constitution more in his response to the Supreme Court's Second Amendment ruling today. He flipped his top and went so far off the deep end that he seemed to imagine that Justice Scalia just gave the nod for citizens to get "machine guns" to indulge their newly affirmed ability to indiscriminately fire their loaded guns "at will" in D.C. In fact in this op ed, King was so unhinged that he seemed to utterly dispense with logic as he penned his newest ode to the wild-eyed phobia that is his inordinate fear of guns (yet, curiously, not of criminals).

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Posted at 8:45am on Jun. 27, 2008 One tendentious opinion away.

From the same tyranny.

By Paul J Cella

A quick read of this article will surely leave you outraged. The story is simple enough: a neat amalgam of barbarism and PC bureaucracy, the sort of anarchy compounded by oppression that Liberalism so excels at producing.

A former British soldier endures as his neighborhood terrorized by a pack of feral young thugs (“yobs,” as they call them over there) for several days. He calls the police; they never come. He looks for an officer; finds none. Coming home one day to find his wife in tears and terrified, he finally has enough, and goes out to execute a citizen’s arrest, dragging one of the thugs into house and calling his mother. Thereupon the police arrive with the mother — and naturally arrest the homeowner.

This is justice under Liberalism.

Let it be noted that there was a somewhat similar case in Illinois five years ago, where a man who fought off an intruder in his house was charged with a handgun violation. State Sen. Obama voted against bills to remedy this manifest injustice twice.

Yesterday we all sat around in worried anticipation, hoping the Supreme Court would manage, this time, to maintain the plain meaning of the words of our Constitution and restore to us our self-government. The outcome was a good one — barely. But the tyranny of the Court is still in place. The four Liberals very frequently succeed in persuading Justice Kennedy to join them in their usurpations. They care not one whit about the plain meaning of the Constitution. They do exactly as they please.

Here in America, packs of feral youths exist in appalling abundance, just like in Britain. But most of them are well aware that their potential victims may be armed. On that fact, friends, much of our liberty hangs.

And we are only a tendentious opinion from one of the Liberal Usurpers on the Court, or their creature Kennedy, under the spell of the New York-DC elite adulation — one tendentious opinion citing foreign law, or sweet mystery of life, or mystical evolving standards, away from the same tyranny that would send the homeowner who defends his wife against thugs to jail, while showering the thugs with sympathy.

Posted in D.C. v. Heller | Great Britain | Guns | Law | Supreme Court | thugs — Comments (5)/ Email this page » / Read More »