Our goal is to have intelligent discussion of the topics of the day. We realize everyone has their opinion and they should be allowed to express it in a discussion forum without calling each other names. We learn from discussion and not from name calling or argument.We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. See details
Contact Form
Showing posts with label Supreme Court Justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supreme Court Justice. Show all posts
“You’re crazy,” they said. “Nobody wants to take away your guns.
“So,” they continued, “hand over your guns.”
On Tuesday, The New York Times once again revealed the ultimate agenda of gun control proponents in the United States: a full-scale gun grab. The charge was led on the op-ed page by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who thankfully no longer wields power in the judiciary. His piece is a mishmash of Leftist sloganeering and bad legalese.
He begins by praising the marches and rallies that have taken place since the Parkland shooting:
Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.
This is silly, frankly. Rallies and marches take place all the time, and they rarely lead to concerted action on the legislative front. In 2000, 750,000 demonstrators showed up to the Million Mom March to push gun control and scaremonger about the NRA; no legislation was forthcoming. Less than one-third that number showed up on Saturday in DC, but we’re supposed to believe that some sort of game changer has taken place in American public opinion?
But according to Stevens, the marches are a sign that it’s time to seriously curb weapons ownership in the United States:
That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
So, it’s not enough to pass a law that would effectively bar the ownership of all semi-automatic weapons – nearly all weapons in the US, which would obviously violate the Second Amendment under both its text and DC v. Heller (2008). Stevens wants the Second Amendment gone.
Well, thanks for his honesty, I suppose.
He continues:
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
Yes, clearly Americans have nothing to worry about when a massive centralized government sweeps in to confiscate all privately-owned weapons in the United States. That’s never been followed by anything bad. And obviously the government will be able to protect us from the predation of criminals, just as they protected the children of Parkland, where the FBI ignored two credible warnings, the local law enforcement authorities ignored over 40 calls to the home, and the school ignored the behavior of the shooter.
Neil Gorsuch Confirmed by Senate as Supreme Court Justice
Photo
Judge Neil M. Gorsuch during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.CreditAl Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Judge Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on Friday to become the 113th justice of the Supreme Court, capping a political brawl that lasted for more than a year and tested constitutional norms inside the Capitol’s fraying upper chamber.
The development was a triumph for President Trump, whose campaign appeal to reluctant Republicans last year rested in large part on his pledge to appoint another committed conservative to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. However rocky the first months of his administration may have been, Mr. Trump now has a lasting legacy: Judge Gorsuch, 49, could serve on the court for 30 years or more.
“As a deep believer in the rule of law, Judge Gorsuch will serve the American people with distinction as he continues to faithfully and vigorously defend our Constitution,” the president said.
Vice President Mike Pence presided over the final vote on Friday, a show of force for the White House on a day when his tiebreaking vote as president of the Senate was not necessary. The final tally was 54-45 in favor of confirmation.
The confirmation was also a vindication of the bare-knuckled strategy of Senate Republicans, who refused even to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Merrick B. Garland, saying the choice of the next justice should belong to the next president.
Yet the bruising confrontation has left the Senate a changed place. Friday’s vote was only possible after the Senate discarded longstanding rules meant to ensure mature deliberation and bipartisan cooperation in considering Supreme Court nominees. On Thursday, after Democrats waged a filibuster against Judge Gorsuch, denying him the 60 votes required to advance to a final vote, Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option: lowering the threshold on Supreme Court nominations to a simple majority vote.
The confirmation saga did not help the reputation of the Supreme Court, either. The justices say politics plays no role in their work, but the public heard an unrelentingly different story over the last year, with politicians, pundits and well-financed outside groups insisting that a Democratic nominee would rule differently from a Republican one.
Judge Gorsuch possesses the credentials typical of the modern Supreme Court justice. He is a graduate of Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, served as a Supreme Court law clerk and worked as a lawyer at a prestigious Washington law firm and at the Justice Department. He joined the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, in 2006, where he was widely admired as a fine judicial stylist.
During 20 hours of questioning from senators during his confirmation hearings last month, Judge Gorsuch said almost nothing of substance. He presented himself as a folksy servant of neutral legal principles, and senators had little success in eliciting anything but canned answers.
But neither side harbored any doubts, based on the judge’s opinions, other writings and the president who nominated him, that Judge Gorsuch would be a reliable conservative committed to following the original understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution.
Judge Gorsuch will be sworn in on Monday, in two ceremonies: a private session at the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will preside, and a public event at the White House, where Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will administer a second oath.
A week from Monday, he will put on his robes, follow the court’s custom of shaking hands with each of his colleagues and ascend to the Supreme Court bench to hear his first arguments. A ninth chair, absent since the spring of 2016, will be waiting for him.
He is not a stranger to the court, having served as a law clerk in 1993 and 1994 to Justice Byron R. White, who died in 2002, and Justice Kennedy, who continues to hold the crucial vote in many closely divided cases.
He will be the first former Supreme Court clerk to serve alongside a former boss. And he may recall Justice White’s observation about how transformative a new addition to the bench can be. “Every time a new justice comes to the Supreme Court,” Justice White liked to say, “it’s a different court.”
The court has been short-handed since Justice Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016. Within hours, the Republican majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the seat would not be filled until a new administration came to power.
TRUMP’S NEW GOVERNMENTBy NEETI UPADHYE and DAVE HORN1:43How Neil Gorsuch Interprets the Constitution
Video
How Neil Gorsuch Interprets the Constitution
Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s choice for Supreme Court justice, adheres to originalism, a judicial approach that would deeply affect how he would make decisions from the bench.
By NEETI UPADHYE and DAVE HORN on Publish DateMarch 22, 2017.Photo by Eric Thayer for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
It was perhaps the most audacious escalation in a series of precedent-busting Senate skirmishes in recent decades — tracing from Democratic opposition to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas to the wide-scale use of the filibuster by Republicans under Mr. Obama. Republicans have pinned blame squarely on their opponents, citing Democratic blockades of judicial nominees under President George W. Bush and a rule change in 2013, when Democrats controlled the Senate, barring the filibuster for lower judgeships and executive branch nominees.
But by design, that move left the Supreme Court filibuster untouched. Democrats have insisted that history remember who toppled this final emblem of minority party influence over confirmations.
“They have had other choices,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said of Republicans, after arguing for weeks that the nomination should be withdrawn if Judge Gorsuch could not earn 60 votes. “They have chosen this one.”
Over the last year, the eight-justice court has deadlocked a few times, but it has employed all kinds of strategies to avoid being completely hobbled. The justices have ducked some cases, issued vanishingly narrow decisions in others and slow-walked still others, waiting for a ninth justice to resolve what would otherwise be a 4-4 tie.
On his third day on the bench, Justice Gorsuch will hear what may be the most important case of the term, a church-state clash with accessible facts and vast implications. On the Federal Court of Appeals in Denver, Judge Gorsuch was receptive to claims based on religious freedom, and he may make an early mark at the Supreme Court in that same area.
There is good reason to think he may cast the decisive vote in the case, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, No. 15-577. The court has signaled that it feared a deadlock, taking an extraordinarily long time to schedule arguments.
The justices agreed to hear the case in January 2016, when Justice Scalia was still alive. Indeed, he may have cast the fourth vote required to place the case on the court’s docket.
Other cases the court agreed to hear that day were argued and decided by the end of the last term, in June. But the court put the religion case on a very slow track, scheduling it for argument in the waning days of the current term.
Get the Morning Briefing by Email
What you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday.
The case arose from a program in Missouri that helps schools use recycled tires to resurface playgrounds. State officials rejected an application from a Lutheran church that wanted to participate in the program for a playground at its preschool and day care center.
The officials based their decision on the Missouri Constitution, which bars spending public money “in aid of any church.”
The church argued that the state’s Constitution violated equal protection principles and the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion. Missouri said states should have leeway to decide for themselves whether and how much to help religious groups.
One of Justice Gorsuch’s earliest votes, then, will be in a case that could refashion the rules for how much state governments can keep their distance from religion.
Should the court deadlock in cases it has already heard this term, as is possible in ones on a cross-border shooting and fair housing, it could order them reargued so that Justice Gorsuch might break the tie. In all likelihood, such rearguments would come in the court’s next term, which starts in October.
Among the cases the court has already agreed to take up next term are three about whether companies can use employment contracts to prohibit workers from banding together to take legal action over workplace issues. In the time before Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation, Democrats expressed particular concern about his record on workers’ rights, suggesting that his rulings tended to favor the privileged.
Cases concerning arbitration clauses with class-action waivers in other settings have divided the court along ideological lines, with the conservative justices voting to uphold the provisions. Here, too, Justice Gorsuch may hold the decisive vote.
The court will also hear a case on whether corporations can be sued for complicity in human rights abuses abroad, a question that has echoes of the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums in elections.
The court divided 5-4 along ideological lines in both Citizens United and an earlier human rights case, meaning that Justice Gorsuch’s vote may once again prove crucial.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) gets blasted after she said she would oppose Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination because of his "legalisms." (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) appears to be confused over what a judge’s job is.
The liberal senator took to Twitter Friday to explain why she would be voting “no” to Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch when the full Senate gets to vote on his nomination later next month.
“Judge Gorsuch has consistently valued legalisms over real lives. I won’t support his nomination,” Harris tweeted Friday, linking to an op-ed she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle detailing her decision.
In the op-ed, Harris wrote: “Judge Gorsuch’s record also shows he’s willing to favor corporations over the American people. He believes companies can impose their religious views on employees and deny women birth-control coverage. And he has been hostile toward federal agencies that protect American workers and consumers.”
However, in the op-ed, Harris didn’t really explain what she meant by “legalisms.”
Still, during his hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, Gorsuch explained that his rulings on the Supreme Court would be based not on his personal feelings or political views, but rather the Constitution and the law — which may be what Harris says she doesn’t like.
Naturally, though, Twitter had a field day with Harris’ remarks:
@SenKamalaHarris You mean he respects the actual law and doesn't insert his personal interpretations or opinions? It's like he's a real judge or something!
@SenKamalaHarris Good to know you don't value the constitution which is the bedrock of the greatest system anywhere. Every Dem unanimous supported last time
Harris’ comments are concerning given that prior to being elected to the Senate, she was attorney general of California, where her job was to uphold and defend the law.
