We almost lost the second amendment.

Here is the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Heller case.


The recent Supreme Court decision overturning the gun ban in Washington DC was very narrowly decided. Four justices dissented, in effect saying that the gun ban in DC (and some other cities) was constitutional. Many Liberals agreed.

The Virginian Pilot commented:

What you think of the Supreme Court's decision this week on the Second Amendment largely depends on where you live.

In D.C., or Chicago - both of which have draconian gun-ownership laws - the opinion penned by Justice Antonin Scalia will seem to some like an assault on local rule, not to mention the grammar of the Constitution.

It’s a perfect illustration of what’s wrong with the Liberals’ view of the Supreme Court. They view its role as a policy making body, one that makes up rules that you agree with depending on where you live and what your politics are. As such it is given the role as the ultimate authority on all things.

Can we ban churches?

Try this though experiment. Let’s go to the first amendment; the part about not prohibiting the free exercise of religion. And let’s say that a community of people decided that the city should prohibit the building of churches. There could be any number of reasons given by the church banners: zoning issues, traffic issues, tax issues, noise issues. The amendment banners could with a straight face argue that you have every right to worship, you just could not gather to do it. And if you argued with them that the effect of the local ordinance is the end of the free exercise of religion, they would come back with the accusation that you are assaulting local rule.

We have a Bill of Rights specifically to prevent local rules from abridging those rights. What is frightening is that a bare majority of the Supremes – the one part of the government that is MOST CHARGED with protecting those rights – is dangerously close to stripping away the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Can we ban newsprint?

Let’s try another one. The first amendment prohibits abridging a free press. Now follow me on this: the Bush administration has just put polar bears on the list of species threatened by global warming. The US, which has only 5% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of the world’s newsprint. That is about 10 million tons of newsprint annually. Newsprint is virtually all carbon, being made primarily from trees. Literally hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide is produced in making and disposing of newsprint. Carbon dioxide is being blamed for warming the planet so it’s reasonable to make a law that forbids the manufacture of newsprint. Such a law is a reasonable response, some would say, to keep newspapers from killing polar bears.

Now keep in mind that newspapers are not one of life’s necessities; they are a total luxury. Thanks to modern technology their product can be delivered more efficiently and with lower CO2 emissions in the form of pixels on your computer screen; carbon free pixels.

Would this simple and elegant approach to ridding the planet of harmful greenhouse gasses be unconstitutional? Let’s see how we can frame this to appeal to the kind of numbnuts that writes for the MSM. Perhaps we can get five Supreme Court justices to decide that this is a common sense solution to the certain environmental destruction of the planet if greedy press lords are to be prevented from furthering their brazen destruction of the planet.

As an extra bonus, the remaining press will be freer than ever once the obstacle of the dead tree press removed is removed from its path.

You can assume what the current press would have to say about my proposal. But keep in mind that a ban on newsprint is a less direct assault on a free press than the DC gun ban was an assault on the second amendment.


An unarmed public can be tyrannized.

What the second amendment banners wish to do is specifically to reverse what the second amendment was ratified to accomplish: to serve as a check on tyranny. The constitution was written at a time when the founders were very aware of the propensity of governments to oppress their people by disarming them and creating armed groups to suppress dissent.

Lest anyone thing that this is a fear that has disappeared with time, we need only refer reports of tyrannical governments around the world killing people to stay in power.

Justice Scalia says in his opinion(page 25):

… history showed that the way tyrants had eliminated a militia consisting of all the ablebodied men was not by banning the militia but simply by taking away the people’s arms, enabling a select militia or standing army to suppress political opponents. This is what had occurred in England that prompted codification of the right to have arms in the English Bill of Rights. The debate with respect to the right to keep and bear arms, as with other guarantees in the Bill of Rights, was not over whether it was desirable (all agreed that it was) but over whether it needed to be codified in the Constitution. During the 1788 ratification debates, the fear that the federal government would disarm the people in order to impose rule through a standing army or select militia was pervasive in Antifederalist rhetoric. See, e.g., Letters from The Federal Farmer III (Oct. 10, 1787), in 2 The Complete Anti-Federalist 234, 242 (H. Storing ed. 1981). John Smilie, for example, worried not only that Congress’s “command of the militia” could be used to create a “select militia,” or to have “no militia at all,” but also, as a separate concern, that “[w]hen a select militia is formed; the people in general may be disarmed.”

The Supreme Court as boss.

Jonah Goldberg makes an excellent point that the more power the Supreme Court arrogates to itself, the less power the other branches of government have. And the less freedom the people have.

Supreme Courtier? If the Supreme Court is boss, Congress is Dilbert.

Out of 16 major American institutions, Congress ranks dead last in the eyes of the American people according to Gallup. Even HMOs are more revered. If Carrot Top and Joey Buttafuoco were elected to Congress, it would improve the legislative branch’s reputation.

The reasons for Congress’s craptacular standing are too long to list here. But some culprits never get blamed, even though they are hiding in plain sight. Chief among them: the U.S. Supreme Court.

Have you ever had a boss who treated you like a child, second-guessed you, reworked whatever you did so that you felt no ownership of the final product? As a result, did you take your job less and less seriously precisely because you knew that whatever you produced wouldn’t really be yours anyway?

Well, the Supreme Court is the boss, and Congress is the Dilbert. There was a time when the U.S. Congress took the Constitution very seriously. Even after Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that established the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, Congress and the president were still the chief guardians of the Constitution. Indeed, before the Civil War, only two acts of Congress were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

These days, the Court seems to find duly enacted laws unconstitutional six days a week and twice on Sunday.

Lawmakers rarely bother their pretty little heads with the Constitution. Rather, they just load as much spit, tar, Vaseline, and whatever else they can think of on a legislative fastball and try to get it over SCOTUS’ plate. If those imperial umpires don’t call a constitutional strike, well, then — voilá — it must be constitutional.

And with the editorial writers of the Virginian Pilot as examples of what the lumpenliberals are thinking regarding the Constitution and the Supremes, it’s going to be a long time before the two other branches of government get their balls back.