Supreme Court and the 2nd Amendment
Re. 2nd amendment. Progressives complain that the SCOTUS is guilty of judicial activism. Are they right?
Erwin Chemerinsky, who is the dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, argues for the LA Times that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are guilty of judicial activism. This while conservatives often deplore such activism; one should not legislate from the bench. But that’s exactly what the SCOTUS has done this time, according to the author at least.
Chemerinsky’s argument is simple: since the Supreme Court did never before acknowledge an individual right to keep and bear arms, today’s court is activist.
But is it that simple?
From a conservative point of view, the case is far more nuanced… and simple at the same time; the laws were changed, the interpretation changed, etc. by progressives. For more than a century or so, the common believe was that the second amendment guaranteed before mentioned individual rights. America’s Founding Fathers did not believe that only members of a militia could have guns; for them, it was an individual right.
But then progressives took over the nation’s highest court. These progressives were more than willing to break with the traditional, social and political interpretation. Before them, no court ever dealt with this question, simply because it was not up for debate; there was unanimity about it.
But progressives changed all that. And now they pretend that the progressive, at that time radical, interpretation is actually the conservative one. To put it differently, they are mimicking Big Brother; twisting and turning so much, that words lose their meaning.
Be sure to read Chuck Norton’s post on this. He exposes the thinking and rhetoric of America’s progressives quite well:
So what is it that possesses people to quite frankly lie through their teeth about a ruling that anyone can plainly look up, read, and understand? It is testimony that for too many people in power, the ends justifies the means and if lying to students, abandoning the public trust given to you and lying about easily proven history to enforce your ideological views is what is needed, than so be it.
Ah yes, NOT misreading plain English is now "judicial activism!" That darn 2nd Amendment failed to devolve into meaninglessness in the preferred "progressive" fashion, and they just can’t muster the numbers to get it voted out of the Constitution.
In truth both sides accuse the other of judicial activism whenever a ruling goes against their preferred reading, often with some justification, but the "progressive" side of the judiciary is far more guilty of it in the quantitative sense.
The OLD second amendment was not relevant in our current militia-less society. The NEW second amendment is an important step toward hoplocracy (rule by firepower).
The amendment didn’t change, Leif, and the langauge is plain. Only in the last few decades has there been any doubt, and that only in the minds of those who just don’t like what it says.
Of course it’s judicial activism–they read the actual words instead of inventing a penumbra!
Claiming the conservatives are guilty of judicial activism is shameless behavior on the part of self styled progressives. The Second Amendment has clearly been recognized by its authors as an individual right of the people - all citizens. This has been tacitly ignored for the past seven decades as the public acquiesced to various gun control measures touted as crime-fighting measures, starting with the control of machine guns, and increasingly limiting what firearms urban residents could own.
The notion that the SCOTUS could re-write the constitution to suit the legislative goals of progressives received much greater acceptability when abortion became an issue. The Roe vs.Wade decision really stretched credulity by arguing that the privacy protections extended somehow into a right to an abortion beyond anything enacted by a state legislature. The role of the courts is to judge the laws enacted by the legislative branch, not to make laws. The progressives don’t see the creation of a right to abortion by the Supreme Court as judicial activism, but they feel that the actual adherence to the Constitution by the same court is an act of unprecedented activism. We should not be surprised, since these are the same people who were parsing what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Hi Orson - may I sum up your post this way? "The truth to a communist is anything that supports communism." - Joseph Stalin