Supreme Court Conservatives Blast Fellow Justices for Backing Down on Gun Rights
If this doesn’t sharpen the focus on 2020 election, not much will.
The Supreme Court delivered another disappointment to conservatives Monday, not only by deciding to insert transgender rights into American law, but by turning away a slate of court cases that aimed to solidify a right that’s actually enshrined in the Constitution.
Fortunately, two of the staunchest conservatives on the high court let it be known they weren’t happy with their colleagues. Justice Clarence Thomas — with evident mockery — compared the court’s disregard for the Second Amendment with liberal justices’ knee-jerk predictability on abortion.
According to Bloomberg, the court on Monday rejected even hearing 10 gun-rights cases, including challenges to New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland laws that restrict permits to carry firearms for self-defense, as well as bans on “assault weapons” in Massachusetts and Cook County, Illinois, which includes the utopia of peaceful coexistence known as Chicago.
Liberals were likely laughing at yet another high court battle going their way (since the court refused to hear the challenges, the laws stand), but judging by a dissent Thomas wrote, joined in part by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the patience of the court’s conservatives is wearing thin.
And considering the relative age of some other members of the high court — the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 87, Stephen Breyer will be 82 come Election Day — there’s a good chance that the man elected in November will have replaced at least one justice by the time January 2025 rolls around.
President Donald Trump has made no secret of his support for Second Amendment rights, and his selection of one or two more justices on the Supreme Court could help ensure that in the next few years, the kinds of cases that were turned away on Monday could be making lasting case law in favor of gun owners.
In his dissent, Thomas noted — as he has in the past — that the high court treats gun rights as a kind of optional right in the Constitution that state and local governments can toy with at will, while it consistently treats abortion as though it were actually included in the conversations in Philadelphia back in 1787.
As described by Law.com, one case involved a New Jersey man who sought a permit to carry a weapon because his job as a supplier of automatic teller machines made him a target for armed robbery.
Most sane people would think a job that requires, by definition, carrying a large amount of cash would justify a weapon permit, but that wasn’t good enough for the local police chief who needed to know about “specific threats,” Law.com reported.
It’s important to remember that the Second Amendment doesn’t say “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed if they face specific threats.”
In the dissent Kavanaugh joined, Thomas contrasted the court’s reluctance to take on the New Jersey case to the alacrity its liberals demonstrate when it comes to protecting the “right” of every woman to abort the child growing in her womb — a “right” invented out of whole cloth in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, the most shameful ruling since the Dred Scott decision (another malicious masterpiece of Democratic reasoning).
“The text of the Second Amendment protects ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.’ We have stated that this ‘fundamental righ[t]’ is ‘necessary to our system of ordered liberty,’” Thomas wrote.
“Yet, in several jurisdictions throughout the country, law-abiding citizens have been barred from exercising the fundamental right to bear arms because they cannot show that they have a ‘justifiable need’ or ‘good reason’ for doing so. One would think that such an onerous burden on a fundamental right would warrant this Court’s review. This Court would almost certainly review the constitutionality of a law requiring citizens to establish a justifiable need before exercising their free speech rights. And it seems highly unlikely that the Court would allow a State to enforce a law requiring a woman to provide a justifiable need before seeking an abortion. But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the Court simply looks the other way.” (Emphasis added.)
That’s the long and short of it.
Outside of the current hyperemotional allegations that American police are targeting black men — which researchers like the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald have repeatedly proven to be a myth — few subjects demonstrate liberal hypocrisy on the Constitution more clearly than their celebration of the “right” of abortion versus their scorn for the actual right to bear arms.
(The high court has yet to announce its decision in June Medical Services LLC v. Gee, another of the term’s closely watched cases involving a Louisana law that requires abortionists to have admitting privileges at hospitals near the clinics they operate.)
There’s no doubt American conservatives have been let down repeatedly by Republican presidents’ appointment to the Supreme Court. The Charlie Brown-Lucy act was getting old even before Chief Justice John Roberts pulled the granddaddy of all betrayals with his 2012 ruling in that saved Obamacare. As a moral monstrosity, it wasn’t quite in the league with Dred Scott and Roe, but intellectually speaking, it’s near thing.
And there’s no doubt that conservatives were hearing the Supreme Court argument for electing Republican presidents long before now-President Donald Trump rode down that Trump Tower escalator in 2015 on his way to changing world history.
But thanks to the GOP hold on the Senate, Trump has had four years to appoint record-setting numbers of men and women to the federal bench. He’s appointed two Supreme Court justices (only one of whom, regrettably, joined in Monday’s dissent.)
It’s probably not a coincidence that Thomas and Kavanaugh were the two justices who survived the most brutal of attacks on their way to the high court, they’ve both been through fights few public figures have survived.
Clearly they’re ready to keep fighting.
If Trump wins in November, there’s a good chance they’ll be getting more support before his second term is over.
If former Vice President Joe Biden is in the White House, however, it’s going to be a long time before conservatives get another chance – if they ever do.
Of course, Monday’s decisions were disappointments, but it’s what happens next that matters — and the biggest “what happens next” on the calendar right now is Nov. 3.
If Monday’s events didn’t sharpen the focus on that date, not much else will.
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