Why Stop at Gun Rights?
Sunday November 30, 2008
Related: Barack Obama on Gun Rights, Gun Control, and the Second Amendment
George F. Will brings us the strange case of J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was shortlisted twice by the Bush administration for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court but has since come out against a good ruling supported by both of the eventual Bush appointees:
If a Supreme Court appointee believes, as many conservative judges do, that the Supreme Court should abide by what is generally a very narrow, decidedly non-civil libertarian reading of the Constitution that doesn't protect abortion and birth control access, pornography, the right to counsel, lesbian and gay rights, private telephone calls, habeas corpus, humane prison conditions, and so on and so forth...then how comfortable should civil libertarians be that such judges will draw the line at gun rights? Why can a judge who reads the Constitution narrowly in every other instance be trusted to adopt a broad, generous interpretation of the right to bear arms?
Heller was, of course, a 5-4 conservative ruling. But the doomsday scenario that many conservatives propose is that an Obama presidency could mean the end of Heller, when the Bush administration was a hair's breadth from appointing a justice whose opinion would have generated the same result anyway. So why would any civil libertarian have voted for McCain and put all of these other rights at risk, just on the off chance that his judicial appointees might one day have the opportunity to preserve the Second Amendment? That would have been a very expensive gamble.
George F. Will brings us the strange case of J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was shortlisted twice by the Bush administration for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court but has since come out against a good ruling supported by both of the eventual Bush appointees:
... [A] distinguished conservative jurist argues that the court's ruling [in District of Columbia v. Heller] was mistaken and had the principal flaws of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion ruling that conservatives execrate as judicial overreaching.One of the most frequently-asked questions I've received from conservative readers is why I endorsed Obama over McCain, given McCain's superior position on gun rights. I usually respond that gun rights is not the only civil liberties issue out there, but consider this...
Both rulings, says J. Harvie Wilkinson, suddenly recognized a judicially enforceable right grounded in "an ambiguous constitutional text" ...
Wilkinson says that when a right's definition is debatable, generous judicial deference should be accorded to legislative judgments -- particularly those of the states, which should enjoy constitutional space to function as laboratories for testing policy variations.
If a Supreme Court appointee believes, as many conservative judges do, that the Supreme Court should abide by what is generally a very narrow, decidedly non-civil libertarian reading of the Constitution that doesn't protect abortion and birth control access, pornography, the right to counsel, lesbian and gay rights, private telephone calls, habeas corpus, humane prison conditions, and so on and so forth...then how comfortable should civil libertarians be that such judges will draw the line at gun rights? Why can a judge who reads the Constitution narrowly in every other instance be trusted to adopt a broad, generous interpretation of the right to bear arms?
Heller was, of course, a 5-4 conservative ruling. But the doomsday scenario that many conservatives propose is that an Obama presidency could mean the end of Heller, when the Bush administration was a hair's breadth from appointing a justice whose opinion would have generated the same result anyway. So why would any civil libertarian have voted for McCain and put all of these other rights at risk, just on the off chance that his judicial appointees might one day have the opportunity to preserve the Second Amendment? That would have been a very expensive gamble.
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