Major Supreme Court cases for the new term

AP via Breitbart ^ | October 4, 2009 | Staff

[La Enchiladita]

Highlights of some high-profile cases that the Supreme Court will take up in its term that begins Monday (10/5/09):

_Guns: The Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms has never been held to apply to state and local laws restricting guns. The court is taking up a challenge to a handgun ban in Chicago to decide whether this right, like many others in the Bill of Rights, acts to restrict state and local laws or only federal statutes. If the court sides with gun rights supporters, lawsuits to overturn all manner of gun control laws are likely.

_Animal cruelty videos: A 1999 federal law bars depictions of acts of animal cruelty, including pit bull fights. A federal appeals court overturned a Virginia man's conviction and struck down the law because it impermissibly restricted his First Amendment rights. The Obama administration says courts should treat this issue the same as child pornography and rule that pictures and videos deserve no constitutional protection.

_Mojave cross: For most of the past 75 years, a cross on public land in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve has stood as a memorial to World War I soldiers. The court takes up a long-running legal fight over whether the cross, which Congress declared a national memorial, violates First Amendment religious protections despite Congress' decision to transfer the land to private ownership.

[missanne]

I love your tagline too!

[William Tell]

bvw said: "The 14th causes problems because it was trying to fix something that was NOT broken in the original charter, ..."

The nearly fatal flaw in the U.S. Constitution was the compromise that permitted the continuation of the enslavement of some people by other people. I believe that our Founders knew that they were simply "kicking the can down the road" as far as addressing the slavery problem.

I would bet that many of our Founders would not have been surprised to learn that the U.S. was to be engaged in a Civil War costing half a million lives less than a century after the nation's founding. It was expedient to form a union of thirteen rather than two unions of smaller size, but the result was forseeable.

Having grown into adulthood during the time when "separate but equal" was being clearly demonstrated to be "unequal", I think the Fourteenth Amendment was a necessary attempt to stop de facto enslavement AFTER the Civil War.

[vox_freedom]

Thanks missanne. :-)