Tag Archives: Judicial Activism

Commentary

Tom Sowell on gun control and judicial activism

2 Comments
Thomas Sowell

His latest column is here.

Excerpt:

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?

Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn’t be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.

[…]If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.

There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn’t happen very often doesn’t mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.

When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.

The whole point of strict gun control or lax gun control is to reduce violent crime rates. All we have to do is look and see whether stricter gun control, like the UK handgun ban of 1997, raises or lowers violent crime rates. It’s not for judges to make that assessment – it’s for the people, and their legislators, to decide. I used to be a judicial activist supporter when I was younger. But not after I read Tom Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions” book.

This point about judges interpreting the law also applies to businesses and capitalism. If judges can change the rules that businesses operate under arbitrarily, then fewer people will start businesses. It’s bad enough that they have to put up with so many taxes and regulations. If one loopy judge can take away everything you own by legislating from the bench, then what is the point of even trying to start a business?

If you want jobs, you need small business. If you want small business, you need strict constructionist judges. If you want strict constructionist judges, you vote Republican. (And you get pro-life and pro-marriage for FREE!)

Thomas Sowell is my #1 favorite economist.

UPDATE: Hot Air wonders how the liberal SCOTUS guys can oppose the clear meaning of the Constitution so openly.

Commentary

The case against Elena Kagan, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee

1 Comment

From the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

We know she cut corners in order to preserve partial-birth abortions. Vast majorities of the American public oppose partial-birth abortion, which involves crushing the skull of a partially born baby and which the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan characterized as, for all intents and purposes, open “infanticide.” Yet when serving as a legal adviser to former President Bill Clinton, Ms. Kagan deliberately withheld from the president a finding by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that partial-birth abortion is virtually never “the least risky, let alone the ‘necessary,’ approach.” As accurately summarized by the National Right to Life Committee, the result was this: “Ms. Kagan played a key role in keeping the brutal partial-birth abortion method legal for an additional decade.”

We know she is willing to undercut First Amendment free speech for political purposes. Ms. Kagan argued before the Supreme Court that the law should be read to allow the government to prohibit the publication of political pamphlets. In a nation stirred to its own founding by political pamphlets such as “Common Sense” and “The Federalist Papers,” this is an extremely disturbing position. Ms. Kagan also has written of the benefits of “redistribution of expression,” and has written that speech rights are to be “dol[ed] out” as a “favor” from government rather than being pre-existing rights that government cannot take away. She has argued that government would be justified in “disfavoring [an] idea [to] ‘unskew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.”

Read the whole thing.

Related posts

News

Left-leaning US Supreme Court curtails religious liberty on campus

13 Comments

Story from Fox News. (H/T Family Research Council)

Excerpt:

An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won’t let gays join, with one justice saying that the First Amendment does not require a public university to validate or support the group’s “discriminatory practices.”

The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle” as being inconsistent with that faith.

But Hastings, which is in San Francisco, said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.

The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group’s First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college’s nondiscrimination policy.

[…]Justice Samuel Alito wrote a strong dissent for the court’s conservatives, saying the opinion was “a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country.”

“Our proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate,'” Alito said, quoting a previous court decision. “Today’s decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.”

[…]Justice John Paul Stevens was even harsher, saying while the Constitution “may protect CLS’s discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them.”

Stevens, who plans to retire this summer, added that “other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks and women — or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks and women. A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities.”

It should be noted that Sam Alito is a George W. Bush appointee, as was John Roberts. Stevens is widely regarded as the second most liberal Justice on the SCOTUS, with Ruth Bader-Ginsburg who wrote for the majority being the most liberal.

How did the Supreme Court become so liberal? Well, because a majority Christian country voted in Presidents who appointed liberal judges. I have had Christians whom I respect and admire, who love free speech, tell me that they valued things like universal health care, social welfare programs for single mothers and public education. If you want a secular government to take over things in private industry, so that the government has a monopoly funded by mandatory tax collection from Christians, then you get a secular Supreme Court. A secular Supreme Court has no respect for your religious liberty. And the Democrats are the party of secularism. A vote for Democrats is a vote against religious liberty. A vote against the public practice of Christianity.

If you young Christians are looking for something to do, why not get your law degrees and join the ADF or the HSLDA? And I am especially talking about you homeschoolers. Don’t homeschool yourselves out of a position of influence. If you want to keep your right to be a Christian in public, you’re going to have to fight for those rights. Because standing apart from the academy is equivalent to giving up your rights. You better have a plan to go to college, and I do mean a good college, and grad school after that. No exceptions.

By the way, you can learn more about Barack Obama’s appointee to the Supreme Court. She is going to be FAR WORSE than John Paul Stevens. And again, lots of Christians voted for Obama and thus will cause a loss of religious liberty. Obama has already passed laws that restricted Christians from being as free as they were under Bush, not the least of which is the ability not to be complicit in funding the Big Abortion industry.