You can now legally keep guns in you’re home for personal defense. So, when you get shot down by the local SWAT team breaking into your home in violation of your Fourth Amendment rights, at least you won’t be guilty of violating the law if you had a pistol in your hands at the time of your demise.
A .pdf file (open with caution) of the Court’s decision is here: LINK
Actually I feel very much the same way, only without the irony.
if they’re going to let the gestapo kick in your door, it’s good to have a little something for self-defense.
It just ensures they blow your head off. My guess, is that this will make police shootings go up.
steven, I live in Philadelphia. Blowing people’s heads off is SOP here.
I feel very strongly about my constitutional rights. The 2nd Amendment is vaguely written to be sure, but I hve a right to keep and bear arms and I’m glad the court upheld that position.
BTW the real gun nuts won’t be happy because this decision did not strike down the DC licensing requirement. Real gun nuts hate licensing. So, the Supreme Court continues to help the NRA raise money!
Boy, the federalist society and Bush-league lawyers have come a long way. A real long way.
I actually marvel at the ability of a small fringe group to take over all the important levers of power in this country. It really is remarkable the extent that conservatives have been successful in their goals. The extreme right-wing (with an assist by the NRA) basically worked hard the last few decades to create a new right out of whole cloth (and it doesn’t matter that they criticize the left for creating privacy rights that were not originally in the constitution–the victory of a personal right to bear arms is just too sweet to be ideologically consistent).
Ten years ago I would have put the odds on this decision as 95 to 5. But they did it. By keeping their nose to the grindstone and ignoring the academic world and legal establishment in America the right-wing has changed American jurisprudence for the worse. They just kept plugging away.
The only thing that entices me to vote for Obama is to stop the final act in the radical right-wing takeover of the Court–5 right-wing nutjobs sitting on the Court. But I don’t have such hope for Obama. I suspect he will be like Clinton and other modern Democrats. Whereas the right-wing selects right-wingers the Democrats select slightly less right-wing right-wingers. It’s the way it works.
As in other areas of politics the Democratic strategy is so weak that it may not even be the best strategy to vote for Obama. Maybe we are destined to have a nutjob majority on the Court before it gets better.
To be fair, the Clinton appointees, Breyer and Ginsberg are solid liberals, not merely slightly less right wing. I believe Obama appointees would fit this same pattern. Equally important, is appointees to the federal bench at the Court of Appeals and District Court levels.
Solid “liberals”? What does that mean? That they are to the left of the federalist society nutjobs? I don’t think they would have been “liberal” on the Warren Court. They are moderates. I think the constant description of these people as “liberals” in the media is misleading. Standing up for habeas corpus or saying its cruel and unusual punishment to execute children, the retarded, and those that have not taken another life is hardly “liberal”, for instance. Where in their jurisprudence are they liberal?
And yes, it goes without saying that the lower courts are important as well.
I think if you read their opinions you’d find that they are as liberal as anyone on the Warren Court. Moreso in some respects. The Warren Court gets a lot of props for being liberal, but one has to remember the historical situation and the sheer momentum of events of that era. The Warren court decisions themselves are often no more liberal than anything Stevens, Souter, Breyer or Ginsberg have written now.
I have read the opinions thank you very much.
How many have you read?
I’ve read a lot of opinions, since I was a lawyer, and now a retired lawyer. I have also read a great deal of the Warren Court precedents. One thing you need to understand is that writing dissents, which is what most of the liberal justices have done in cases where the conservatives prevailed doesn’t give you the same latitude that writing majority opinions do. Also, even when writing in the majority, the liberal justices had to attract at least one conservative to vote with them, Kennedy or O’Connor. Therefore, you end up with opinions that compromise in order to get a majority and prevent a worse outcome. From reading their dissents in cases involving criminal matters, the regulatory power of the government, etc., I have no concerns about Breyer or Ginsberg regarding their liberal credentials.
If we get a firm liberal majority they would be voting for expanding individual rights, instead of having to fight a rearguard action against the conservatives on the court. The problem we have is that except for Kennedy, all the conservative justices are relatively young, and the liberals relatively old. So we need Obama just to hold our position on the Court because Stevens and Ginsberg are likely to resign within the next 4-8 years regardless of who is President.
Did your practice focus on constitutional law and the Supreme Court?
Look, there is a ton of scholarship on the ideological leanings of the court. And I don’t suspect that Breyer and Ginsburg will go down as lions of liberal jurisprudence, but your point of them being in a minority on the Court and having to be reactive instead of proactive is a good point. And it’s not that I’m an expert on constitutional law either or the political leanings of the court for that matter. But I think I’m correct in that there has been a radical rightward shift in American jurisprudence the last few decades and a rightward shift in the way the public debates the courts’ role.
I’m not here to criticize the 4 “liberal” justices. They are fine justices. I just take issue with people characterizing them as liberal. I consider them to be fairly mainstream jurists. The conservatives have won a huge political victory–they have been able to characterize our judicial system as being liberal when it’s not. They have so beaten up the media that the MSNBC article I first saw on the death penalty decision says something like “Obama side steps a land mine” by saying he’s against the opinion. As if not supporting the death penalty makes one a crazy hippy liberal that is not fit for office. As if the Supreme Court is willy-nilly issuing far left opinions. And it cheapens our public discourse on the law.
Protecting the judicial branch is about my only motivation to vote for Obama. But I do not take it for granted that Obama will be helpful. In fact, I’m highly dubious. And I take your assurances that he’s going to be great with a grain of salt.
And I don’t want to pick on those two. They are indeed the most “liberal”. I just think the spectrum has shifted so far to the right that the new liberal is the old moderate. Look at criminal opinions. The court has been chipping away at the 4th amendment and other defendant rights. The one exception has been the 8th amendment jurisprudence. That is the one area the court has been “liberal” on criminal issues but as I pointed out above the liberal decisions simply put us in line with the rest of the civilized world (don’t execute children, the retarded, and those that haven’t killed).
Clinton did a good job nominating supremes but he often compromised on lower level judges. The conservatives also did a good job stopping “liberal” judges who weren’t all that liberal.
In Clinton’s defense the conservatives made it harder on Clinton to get his moderate judges confirmed than any other president.
I meant to write that the odds 10 years ago were 95 to 5 against the court finding a right to bear arms.
Didn’t some black man get the death penalty for shooting a police officer who smashed into his home in a case of mistaken address?
Well so much for Scalia’ plain reading of the Constitution as back when it was written. read my comment below..a little foreshadowing???
http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2008/6/21/20546/7207/10#10
To paraphrase the Godfather, Scalia is a pimp. He’ll do whatever sits the outcome he wants to achieve. I’ve known that for a very long time. The Federalist Society is by and large the biggest bunch of legal hypocrites in the country. They aren’t interseted in anything but how to achieve the outcomes they want, which is why they are for states rights one case, and for expanding federal power in another. They are essentially intellectual con artists.