Always Right

Terrific decision

alwaysright — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:37:22 +0000

Justice Antonin Scalia’s decision yesterday in The District of Columbia vs. Heller is brilliant, reading the actual text of the Constitution and applying it in a sensible, reasoned way.
It’s a sterling example of judicial reasoning by original intent.
Calling this a conservative decision is accurate, if one means that it preserves the rights and traditions of our nation but it is insane if it is meant to suggest the ruling is ideological and agenda-driven.
Without any verbal gymnastics of the like that justified the “right to abortion” in Roe vs. Wade (which discussed penumbras of emanations of other rights to reach its conclusion), yesterday’s 2nd Amendment ruling combined the history and the text of the amendment to declare an individual right to own guns.
The ruling does not declare an absolute right to keep and bear arms.
It does not dismiss the amendment’s preamble (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”) but simply refuses to make it the whole of the matter, as the dissenters do.
Instead, Scalia’s ruling holds that the effective part of the amendment is its ending (”the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”) and that “the people” refers to Americans in general.
And, really, this is the only sensible way to read the amendment.
If the drafters of the 2nd Amendment had meant for this right to apply ONLY to those in a militia, the noun at the end would have been, “militia members,” not “people.”
Scalia says it all so much better, so I encourage everyone to read the decision itself.
Below are a few excerpts to whet the intellectual appetite:

“There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment’s right of free speech was not. Thus, we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation, just as we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose.”
***
“The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it “shall not be infringed.” As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876), “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed . . . .”
Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents.
“Under the auspices of the 1671 Game Act, for example, the Catholic James II had ordered general disarmaments of regions home to his Protestant enemies. These experiences caused Englishmen to be extremely wary of concentrated military forces run by the state and to be jealous of their arms. They accordingly obtained an assurance from William and Mary, in the Declaration of Right (which was codified as the English Bill of Rights), that Protestants would never be disarmed: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” This right has long been understood to be the predecessor to our Second Amendment. …
“In the tumultuous decades of the 1760’s and 1770’s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. A New York article of April 1769 said that “[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.”
***
“The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose.
“The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.”
***
“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

What a surprise …

alwaysright — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:35:17 +0000

… Obama’s as big a liar as any of them.
It wasn’t really surprising that Barack Obama decided to forego public financing of his presidential campaign.
He’s this year’s champion fundraiser — raising $265.4 million so far to John McCain’s roughly $96.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Why not maintain that advantage, rather than accepting the $84.1 million spending limit that comes with public funds?
The trouble is that Obama promised to take the public financing if his Republican opponent were to do the same.
McCain, like every major party presidential candidate since the money first became available in 1976, is taking it.
So, Obama is breaking his first promise as a presidential candidate BEFORE he takes office.
His excuse, that he needs the extra money to counter the “smears and attacks” he anticipates from GOP-leaning independent groups, is, of course, absurd.
Left-leaning independent groups are raising money hand over fist.
Not that I want anybody taking public funding. It’s a silly system.
In fact, Obama’s fundraising has been impressive: Small donors inspired by a candidate helping him win election with their $25-$200 donations.
But Obama’s embrace of the kneejerk liberal mantra that money is evil and should be squeezed out of the system is troubling for two reasons:
1. It’s silly. As his campaign shows, fundraising can be a good indicator of a candidate’s strength. Individuals tend to invest their money only when they really believe in a candidate.
2. It appears to have been solely self-serving. Obama was willing to live with spending limits because he assumed he would trail his Republican opponent in fundraising.
Now that he’s ahead, that promise gets broken.
An agent of change he aint.

Quite a coalition

alwaysright — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:31:11 +0000

An education reform group has a (sadly) novel idea: Make education policy about what’s best for students.
Imagine that.
Don’t worry so much about protecting teachers’ tenure, or ripening the plum administrative jobs they aspire to, or making education cheaper for senior citizens who don’t want to pay for “other people’s kids.”
The Education Equality Project seeks to pay good teachers better and get rid of ineffective ones and hold administrators and parents accountable for children’s performance.
David Brooks’ recent column in The New York Times makes the case that Barack Obama has been too slow to embrace this group’s reforms, that’s Obama’s taking the easy way out by not taking on the teachers’ unions.
That aside, the politics of this movement are fascinating.
Among those involved in the group are the Rev. Al Sharpton, of whom I and other conservatives are not fans; former Congressman J.C. Watts, a conservative favorite; Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, a rising conservative Democrat; and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who should be a conservative favorite for his willingness to take on education’s special interests (i.e., those who put adults’ concerns before children’s in crafting policy).
I wish this group luck, for the sake of us all (including those grumpy senior citizens, who need to realize that the kids who’ll be paying for their Social Security as U.S. lifespans increase are the children the Education Equality Project are trying to help get the decent education they’ll need to become productive, tax-paying citizens).

Supremes goof on Guantanamo

alwaysright — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:13:43 +0000

I am no fan of how the Bush administration has handled the detention of terror suspects at our base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
I think it took far too long to set up the military commissions to review whether detainees were being rightly held. Surely detainees could have been provided due process sooner.
But, all that notwithstanding, the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday was absurd.
The 5-4 majority opinion is loaded with high-minded rhetoric — “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony Kennedy — but short on specifics as to how, exactly, civilian courts should go about balancing detainees’ habeas corpus rights with certain complicating facts: they’re foreigners without countries wanting to take responsibility for them, many were captured on the battlefield engaged in or plotting deadly violence against the U.S., and at least a couple have been freed only to be caught on the battlefield again.
As Justice Antonin Scalia notes in his dissent, these facts complicate things quite a bit.
Being men without countries makes it hard to turn them over to a reliable authority with any confidence they’ll be tried fairly and punished appropriately.
Catching them on the battlefield makes it hard to demand the same standard of proof.
Doing with Guantanamo or a functional alternative might mean turning terror suspects over to regimes that would treat them much worse. This would also mean denying ourselves useful intelligence we might be able to obtain from them.
And, as Chief Justice John Roberts notes in his dissent, the military commissions offer a venue for habeas corpus appeals. They have a system, one the civilian courts will now have to re-invent in some way to satisfy the Supreme Court’s directive.
Seems like our nation’s top judges decided to saddle up the high horse and leave the messy work of figuring out how to get the horse trained to others.
Lazy effort, indeed.

Bill Neff’s write-in bid

alwaysright — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:00:22 +0000

Bill Neff, who finished fourth out of four candidates in the GOP primary, is now running a write-in campaign to succeed retiring state Sen. Gib Armstrong.
This probably seems like a great idea, what with all the expressed desire for “change” voters seem to be expressing in registering and voting for Barack Obama, and the general disgust with Harrisburg’s continuing shenanigans (most notably the failure to enact any meaningful property tax relief).
The challenge of running a write-in campaign, however, is significant.
Here’s a look at the odds stacked against Neff’s bid, in order of importance from least to most significant.
1. It’s going to be a long ballot, with the state Senate race pretty far down (below President, Congress, attorney general, auditor general and treasurer), which might lead to voter fatigue before they arrive at the chore of writing in Neff’s name.
2. Assuming someone will organize debates — and there should be a good number, given that this is an open seat and the retiring incumbent held the seat for 24 years — on what basis would a debate organizer invite Neff to participate?
Without his name on the ballot, what distinguishes Neff from any other constitutionally qualified resident of the district who might like to get on stage with the candidates and kick the issues around? I suppose Neff could cite the seriousness with which he’s been treated in the Sunday News but that might not last and it might not be enough to overcome another candidate’s objection to his participation.
3. Getting folks to write you in requires extraordinary support (both deep and wide), something Neff’s primary campaign did not seem to generate. He finished fourth, with 2,043 votes, not even half the support enjoyed by third-place finisher Paul Thibault.
I suppose it’s possible to believe that independent voters will show more enthusiasm than did registered Republicans but a campaign capable of generating a successful write-in campaign should have been able to sign up a good number of independents to support Neff in the GOP primary. There’s little evidence that he accomplished anything of the sort.
Bottom line: Neff’s write-in campaign is not hopeless but it’s pretty close.

Popular vote suddenly unpopular

alwaysright — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:46:32 +0000

I don’t usually read her anymore but Anne Coulter does a pretty good job in her most recent Human Events column of noting how the mass media have shifted their position on the importance of the popular vote.
In 2000, it mattered a whole heck of a lot, depriving Al Gore of his rightful place in the White House and all that.
In 2008, any mention of it from Hillary Clinton was derided.
As Coulter notes:

After nearly eight years of having to listen to liberals crow that Bush was “selected, not elected,” this is a shocking about-face. Apparently unaware of the new party line that the popular vote amounts to nothing more than warm spit, just last week HBO ran its movie “Recount,” about the 2000 Florida election, the premise of which is that sneaky Republicans stole the presidency from popular vote champion Al Gore.

Well put.

McCain and conservatives

alwaysright — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:50:36 +0000

Check out this interesting tidbit from Robert Novak on what could be a big problem for John McCain come the fall:

There is probably less enthusiasm for McCain at the grass roots of the Republican Party than we have seen for a Republican nominee (and that includes Bob Dole in 1996). McCain definitely has not made his peace with all the conservative elements of the Republican coalition.

What can McCain do to fix this problem?
I have three suggestions:
1. Find some graceful (or ungraceful) way out of this silly cap-and-trade scheme on gobal warming. Teaming up, even just conceptually, with liberal Independent Joe Lieberman and RINO John Warner on a complex de facto tax system disguised as a Earth-friendly initiative is no way to win over conservatives who like the free market.
While McCain missed the vote that doomed the legislation, he has said he supports such nonsense.
Admitting the whole thing was a mistake, and then explaining why (it costs too much, will kill jobs and is too convoluted to work) might make a switch here palatable to McCain’s independent backers. But, even if it doesn’t, it’s time to flee this sinking policy ship.
2. Make a speech explaining why he’d appoint strict constructionists to the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s said he will, and social conservatives should be moved by such a position, but without a full explanation of his commitment, they might not believe President McCain would do what candidate McCain promises.
3. Plan to pick a solid conservative as vice president, and have your campaign rule out crazy notions that you might pick Lieberman or some other liberal.

Finally out

alwaysright — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:11:50 +0000

Gotta give Hillary Clinton this much: She keeps things interesting.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton will end on Saturday her historic bid to become the first woman president but Barack Obama said he won’t be hurried into a decision on whether to make her his running mate.
Clinton, in an e-mail to supporters, said she “will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.”
…
Clinton’s move to formally declare that she is backing the Illinois senator came after Democratic congressional colleagues made clear they had no stomach for a protracted intraparty battle. Now that Obama has secured the 2,118 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination, Clinton had little choice but to end her quest, and sooner rather than later.
The New York senator told House Democrats during a private conference call Wednesday that she would express support for Obama’s candidacy and congratulate him for gathering the necessary delegates to be the party’s nominee.
Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson said Clinton will express her support for Obama at an event she is hosting Saturday in Washington, D.C., to thank her supporters.
…
“What does Hillary want? What does she want?” Clinton asked, hours after telling supporters Tuesday that she’d be open to joining Obama as his vice presidential running mate.
But by Wednesday, other Democrats made it abundantly clear they wanted something too: a swift end to the often bitter nominating contest.
…
On the telephone call with impatient congressional supporters that included New York Rep. Charles Rangel, a longtime political patron, Clinton was urged to draw a close to the contentious campaign, or at least express support for Obama.
The New York congressional delegation’s Democrats wanted to campaign for Obama this weekend, Rangel said, and weren’t comfortable doing that if she hadn’t formally endorsed her rival.
“The quicker we proved that we were committed to Senator Obama, then the better for all of us,” Rangel said Thursday on CBS’ “Early Show.”
Rangel said Obama and Clinton need each other — it would help him pick up her supporters if she were on the Democratic ticket, and she “needs to maintain momentum” as a national and international leader.
Her decision to acquiesce caught many in the campaign by surprise and left the campaign scrambling to finalize the logistics and specifics behind her campaign departure.
It was an inauspicious end for a candidacy that appeared all but indestructible when it began Jan. 20, 2007.

Personally, I think Obama would be insane to choose her as his running mate but it’ll be interesting to see his pick.
If it’s not Hillary Clinton, will it have to be another woman?
Could it be John Edwards, who although he did John Kerry little good in 2004 might be seen as helping Obama’s hopes of winning once solidly GOP states in the South?
Former Sen. Sam Nunn or retired Gen. Wesley Clark, to boost his military-national security cred?
Or some guy or gal most people have never heard of, such as Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland or Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano?

She just won’t quit

alwaysright — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:42:57 +0000

Still basking in the kind of attention all politicians love, Hillary Clinton conceded nothing Tuesday night.
“This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight,” she said. “In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.”
Many Democrats, the leadership most fervently, want her to drop out already and let the Democratic Party unite behind Barack Obama, who has won the party’s nomination for president.
I have two unrelated reasons for wanting to see her quit:
First, her display of ego in not dropping out after losing the delegate race is becoming too disgusting to watch.
And, second, after 16 years of hearing from her and her husband far too often, I just want the Clintons to fade in the background.
My current political slogan: Go (away) Hillary, go (away) Hillary, go (away) Hillary.

Why my candidate must believe

alwaysright — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:05:13 +0000

This post is not quite coming out of the blue.
Some of Gil Smart’s columns have nearly prompted me to write this and now a response on TalkBack to one of my recent posts here has pushed me to do it.
I would not vote for a candidate for governor or president, and probably not Congress or the state Legislature either, who does not believe in God.
Would I press a candidate for the state House or state Senate on the point? Probably not but an espoused atheist or agnostic would probably have no hope of getting my vote.
Is this because I want a theocracy? No.
Is this because I believe non-believers can’t be moral, ethical people? No. (From all that I have heard about him and what I have witnessed in my limited dealings with him, I believe Gil Smart, for instance, is a wholly decent fellow — moral, ethical and all the rest.)
The reason I want a God-believing candidate for executive office goes back to the belief at the core of this nation’s founding: “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights …”
I would submit that this belief is key to the humility I’d like to see in elected officials, particularly presidents and governors, because they wield much of the life-and-death power of the state.
And I would suggest that a belief in God is the only way to believe in equality of human beings.
Let’s face it: Some people are smarter, better-looking and more physically capable than others. We can even objectively measure some of these things with IQ tests, physical fitness tests and games played by the rules.
The only logic that makes human equality work is a God-based logic that goes something like this: We are all created in God’s image and the differences in ability, beauty and intelligence between us are stunningly insignificant when compared to the gap between all of humanity and God.
And, so if God tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves (in effect, to acknowledge them equal rights), then we have no business doing otherwise.
I do not see on what basis an atheist believes in human equality and the granting of equal rights that flows from that.
Now, has every president who believed in God acted in a way that made his belief in God evident at all times? No, but at least a belief in God offers a chance for the humility I want in every president when making important decisions for our nation.
Ronald Reagan, who I believe exhibited humility, said it best:

We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they’re sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.

Amen.

Oh and, I feel like I owe it to Gil Smart to give him a link here since I talk about him twice above.