RESHAPING THE SUPREME COURT (2nd Amendment)

Now is the time for firearms owners to have their say on America’s highest court, which may be called upon in the future to pass final judgment on the Second Amendment..

Within a short few years, the meaning of the Second Amendment could well be decided by a final edict from nine men and women who sit—unelected and for life terms—on the United States Supreme Court.

Because of impending vacancies on the highest court in the land, firearms owners will soon have an historic opportunity—our only opportunity—to bring our voices to bear on the process of shaping the court.

Given what we can accomplish at the grassroots level in the coming months, the fate of the Second Amendment is in our hands as citizens, as voters.

In the normal career of federal judges, there is but one point when they can be held accountable to the people—during the nomination process. Under the Founders’ unique system of checks and balances, the president submits nominees to the U.S. Senate for its “advice and consent.”

That means that 100 senators—elected officials with nothing less than their own political futures on the line—must answer to ordinary voters concerning who will sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an October 2004 “editorial observer” column intended to turn out voters last November to defeat President George W. Bush’s election to a second term, The New York Times warned:

“If President Bush gets the chance to name three young justices who share the views of Justices Scalia and Thomas, it could fundamentally change America for decades.”

The Times couldn’t have said it better.
What is it about Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas that so frightens the left?
For one thing, both justices can surely be expected to support the Second Amendment as an individual right.
Justice Scalia has written, “Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that. There is no need to deceive ourselves as to what the original Second Amendment said and meant.”
For his part, Justice Thomas raised his Second Amendment views in his June 27, 1997, concurring opinion upholding NRA’s successful constitutional challenge striking down the Brady waiting period. Thomas wrote, “The Second Amendment similarly appears to contain an express limitation on the government’s authority.” He also said, “Perhaps, at some future date, this Court will have the opportunity to determine whether Justice Story was correct when he wrote that the right to bear arms ‘has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.’”

In addition to the Second Amendment, it is the judicial philosophy of the two justices—their definition of the roles of judges—that ignites hatred from the left, including the ban-the-guns crowd.

In terms of his judicial philosophy, Scalia is both an “originalist” and a “textualist,” as is Justice Thomas.

This means that Justice Scalia believes that the words of a text should not be interpreted “strictly” or “liberally.” He feels they should be given their ordinary meaning. That is to say, he believes words should be given the meaning that would have made most sense to the Framers, the legislatures that passed the law, and to the people who must obey it.

The New York Times pre-election “editorial observer” crystal ball gave a gloom and doom assessment for leftists if they lost their war to deny President Bush the White House:

“… It is quite possible that if Mr. Bush is re-elected, he will get three appointments, enough to forge a new majority that would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law of the land.”

On Dec. 10, 2003, the “moderate” majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against challenges (led by NRA) to the repressive strictures of the McCain-Feingold so-called campaign finance reform law. The court majority dictated that paid political speech by grassroots groups like nra could be outlawed—as a federal criminal act—during blackout periods before elections if broadcasts were paid for by corporate funds not strictly regulated by federal overseers.

Nobody, not even the proponents of the broadcast speech gag, thought the Supreme Court would let it stand. The Court’s decision goes to the core of the First Amendment—much to the delight of many in the national media, which were exempted as corporate entities from the restrictions on not-for-profit corporations like NRA.

Here is the so-called “worldview” of the gutting of the First Amend-ment as expressed by Justices Scalia and Thomas in their scathing dissents.

Justice Scalia wrote: “This is a sad day for freedom of speech. Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved restrictions upon … sexually explicit cable programming … would smile with favor upon a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.”

As for his worldview of free speech for Americans wishing to assemble their individual voices, Justice Thomas wrote:

“The First Amendment provides that Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … Nevertheless, the Court today upholds what can only be described as the most significant abridgment of the freedoms of speech and association since the Civil War. With breathtaking scope, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), directly targets and constricts core political speech, the primary object of First Amendment protection …”

The dissenting opinions were brilliantly written, clearly thought out, entirely reasonable. But dissenting opinions, no matter how well reasoned and true, are only dissents from what the majority has decided. In the Supreme Court, as with electoral politics or legislative bodies, the majority rules.

Yet, we now have an historic opportunity to put Justices Scalia and Thomas in the majority, on the winning side of Supreme Court opinions.

With the impending retirement of ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and speculation that as many as three other justices could retire during Mr. Bush’s presidency, what will happen when the Senate exercises its advice and consent role in the nomination process to the Supreme Court will make any political battle in our nation’s history pale in significance.

Those who oppose our freedom—those like New York Sen. Charles Schumer and Mass. Sen. John Kerry, who would see the courts destroy the Second Amendment—have vowed a firestorm if President Bush puts forth judicial candidates who actually believe in the Constitution as written.

Sen. Schumer, who would disarm peaceable Americans in a heartbeat, says, “Ideology should be an explicit part of the (advice and consent) process …”

For new Supreme Court justices, or any new federal judges, Sen. Schumer and his fellow anti-Second Amendment senators on the left are demanding that nominees be “moderate.”

“I personally look for moderate judges,” he said. Sen. Schumer, like others who have done all they can to stop the president’s nominations to any level of the federal courts, demands “balance.” Of course, to Sen. Schumer, balance means keeping conservative judges in the minority writing only dissenting opinions.

The “balance” on Sen. Schumer’s scale of justice always bottoms out under the weight of judges who share his leftist ideology.

“Moderate.” The media uses that word a lot. It is a word that once had a meaning, but has been commandeered as more camouflage. If you wonder what “moderate” means to the far left and to the corporate media, look no further than Justice Scalia’s definition:

“The moderate judge is the one who will devise the new constitution … I think the very terminology suggests where we have arrived at the point of selecting people to write a constitution, rather than people to give us the fair meaning of one that has been democratically adopted.”

That’s what Senators Schumer, Clinton, Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and failed presidential candidate John Kerry want—judges who will write a new constitution, or who will erase parts that they find ideologically offensive, like the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Sen. Schumer has even said, “One or two Scalias or Thomases is one thing. But a bench full of them would drive our courts way out of whack. And that is unacceptable.”

But for us—for the 80 million peaceable Americans who own firearms and exercise the Second Amendment—the courts have already strayed too far from the Constitution; especially the Supreme Court of the United States.

For us, it is already unacceptable. Years of Bill Clinton’s judicial appointments have stacked many of the federal courts with judges who believe their contemporary “values” have greater weight than the Bill of Rights. Our Founding Fathers would be outraged to know that an outright ban on free political speech has been upheld by the highest court in the land.

It’s not just the ideological bent of a U.S. Supreme Court that presents a danger to our future liberty.

Given the way in which our courts have evolved—where judges can ignore the Constitution, re-write laws and erase our founding history—a lone United States District Court judge can have more power than the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate and the president of the United States combined, and nobody elects that judge.

If a judge’s political activism is matched by the ideology of the members of the federal appeals bench, and by the U.S. Supreme Court, our constitutional protections could vanish.

Noting that this dangerous trend has reached all the way to the Supreme Court and is affecting the very foundation upon which America was founded, Justice Scalia wrote:

“I don’t think this is an exaggeration, that the Court has essentially liberated itself from the text of the Constitution, from the text, and even from the traditions, of the American people.”

He pointedly stated, “The Constitution is not a living organism for Pete’s sake, it’s a legal document, and like all legal documents, it says some things, and it doesn’t say other things.”

When NRA members reflect on our legislative and political victories over the last 25 years, we can take extraordinary pride in having shaped an American history where Second Amendment freedom has been preserved, and where individual rights—like the Right-to-Carry and the right of self-defense—have been expanded. We have met the direst assaults on our liberty with victory, time and time again.

We are on the verge of seeing legislation enacted that will end years of abusive lawsuits designed to bankrupt the firearms industry and to destroy the source of firearms and ammunition for America’s peaceable gun owners. What will happen to that protection for our lawful commerce if globalist billionaire George Soros, Hillary Clinton and the national media determine who will constitute the majority on the Supreme Court?

In fact, all the good that nra has accomplished over all these years—even at the state and local level—is subject to what has become a growing judicial tyranny marked by feel-good, relativistic social engineering.

If you haven’t read NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s “Standing Guard” column in this issue (p. 8), please do so.

Wayne spells out the dangers of the current Supreme Court majority’s unprecedented reliance in opinions affecting our lives on “the overwhelming weight of international opinion” and on United Nations treaties never agreed to by the United States.

Justice Scalia, whom President Bush says is a model for those he wants on the federal bench, warns against the court being seduced by globalism:

“… The basic premise of the Court’s argument—that American law should conform to the laws of the rest of the world—ought to be rejected out of hand.”

Justice Scalia’s judicial philosophy is true to the oath of office taken by all Supreme Court justices when they are sworn in:

“I, (name), do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as (title) under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.” (Emphasis added.)

The oath says nothing about international laws. It says nothing about the weight of global opinion. It says nothing about foreign treaties. It says, “… under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Yet, if this globalist trend in our federal courts is not reversed, fealty to international opinion may well some day replace allegiance to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The “overwhelming weight of international opinion” on banning private ownership of firearms threatens to replace the Second Amendment—unless we all take this opportunity to ensure that justices who fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming months and years are men and women who will take an “originalist” and “textualist” view of the oath of office itself.

Sen. Schumer has said, “I have no problem voting in favor of right-wing nominees when there is balance on the other side.”

“Balance” to Schumer, Kennedy, Clinton and Kerry means that judges in the mold of Justices Scalia and Thomas are crushed by the leftist majority—doomed to always impart wisdom worthy of the Founders as dissent.

In the coming weeks and months, NRA members and our families, friends, neighbors and co-workers—all who treasure the Right to Keep and Bear Arms—have the opportunity to change the balance, to ensure that those globalist views and anti-Bill of Rights opinions of individual justices are in the minority, where they are relegated to writing only dissenting opinions.

We have this one opportunity to put the majority of the nine justices on our side—on the side of liberty, on the side of free speech, on the side of the Second Amendment as an individual right and on the side of our vision—the Founding Fathers’ vision—of America.

Rhenquist is likely to be the next to retire because of his health, but I look for Stevens (far left liberal) to be next because of his advanced age (85). We must replace BOTH with strict constitutionalists or this country will fall.

Sen. Schumer has said, “I have no problem voting in favor of right-wing nominees when there is balance on the other side.”

Yeah, right. I have a bridge to sell to anyone that believes that.

Actually we're looking to check out Nacadoches as a potential place to retire and so we're thinking of cutting north thru Louisiana before we hit the border then cross into Texas so that we drive right into there and then straight across to Waco so I can check out the Texas Ranger museum (history teacher y'know) and then south into San Antonio for the pup. We expect to be in Banderas for the 4th of July.

We want to stay away from Houston! Sheeeesh last time we went there it took us four HOURS just to get around the city and the TOLLS O-M-G. That city is just toooooo big. Miami is big too, but I know where the bad spots are, where the predators live and their habits. I'd be too paranoid there to enjoy myself. Be on orange alert all the time and that gets really tiring.

Nacogdoches ... The oldest city in Texas... Lots of shops for the 'you know who' ... You'll enjoy. May as well hit Crawford when you get to Waco... only a few miles west, eat a hamburger at the Crawford Fina Station, maybe sit in the chair the President used... lol.

Five of the current Supremes will be in their 80's or 90's by 2016. Two more will be in their late seventies at that time. (I am excluding Rhenquist from this analysis.)

Whoever is president in '08 and '12 could appoint SEVEN supremes.

If Hillary is president for two terms, we could conceivably have an all Clinton-appointee Supreme Court. Two are already there. Hil could easily add five more, leaving only the presumed Bush-appointed Rhenquist replacement, and a comparatively young Thomas (both of whom better ride Greyhound for 8 years, or else have their planes ck'd out real good before flying).

Whoever is president in '08 and '12 could appoint SEVEN supremes.

It is extremely scary to consider what the court would look like under a Hitlery presidency. They would make the 9th Circus look positively conservative.

"He also said, “Perhaps, at some future date, this Court will have the opportunity to determine whether Justice Story was correct when he wrote that the right to bear arms ‘has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.’”"

Works for me ~ Bump!

Be Ever Vigilant!

Be careful about relying on "state level reciprocity laws". It's been my experience that while most state police officers are well versed on gun laws, many locals are not. You may find yourself delayed by some small town cop, who may believe you're carrying illegally, when in fact, you're not.

My advice? Make sure you obey all traffic laws. (Especially seat belt laws.) Keep your Glock out of sight but accessible and enjoy your trip.

Regards

Whoever is president in '08 and '12 could appoint SEVEN supremes.

I am by nature suspicious of run-of-the-rabble doomsayers who emote more than they think. However, I think in this sober observation (the next president could have seven picks) lurks a potential flashpoint to significant civil disturbance and even armed conflict that could, in the end, prove the doomsayers right.

I believe it is quite likely that neither side will passively accede to a Supreme Court majority that reflects the dominant social and legal philosophy of the other side. At best, there will be an attempt to rebuild the Court into a four liberal, four conservative, one swing vote form. I do not foresee a Democrat president doing such a ting, however.

A Democrat is far more likely to go all-out to pack the Court with as many progressives liberals as possible, and will attempt to fob them off as "moderates" to deceive the great ignorant middle.

I live very close to I-10. Honk and wave as you drive by.

(ok,ok, so I don't life that close!)

But I would recommend timing your return through Pensacola so that you pass through early in the morning. The I-10 bridge westbound lanes are still damaged due to Ivan and the afternoon traffic is backed up for miles due to single lane across the bridge. You'll see it on your way to TX.

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