Posts Tagged ‘supreme court’

Cass Sunstein Hates the Second Amendment

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Here is Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affiars Czar speaking at a school of law in October of 2007:

Remember: like Obama, Sunstein is a “Constitutional Scholar.”  Somehow, in his scholarly studies, he seems to have missed a few key points in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Most notably:

  • Spenver v. Kemna in which it was said directly by the dissent that one of the punishments for committing a crime is “loss of the right to vote or to bear arms.”  This implies that the individual had a right to bear arms previous to committing a crime.
  • Muscarello v. United States in which one of Justice Ginsberg’s points was to define what “carrying a firearm” meant.  In making that point, the Justice said “as the Constitution’s Second Amendment (“keep and bear Arms”) and Black’s Law Dictionary at 214 indicate: “wear, bear, or carry … for the purpose of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action…”  This clearly implies an individual right.

There are many, many more such instances.  Eight of them in the 1980s alone and more for every generation before and since.  The only arguments the gun-grabbers can make are based on weak interpretations of the most recent findings of the Court as well as the original 1939 rights-grabbing finding of the United States v. Miller.

Supremes : ‘Suspected Enemy Combatant’ no Longer a ‘Person’

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

from Dprogram.net

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

Portrait of a non-person. Image from girloftomorrow.
Dred Scott redux:
Enemy combatants denied legal standing

Dred Scott redux:
Enemy combatants denied legal standing

…once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared ‘non-persons’ and have their liberty stripped away…

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.”

They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

Read the rest here.

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