Senate Is to Advise And Consent, Not Obstruct and Delay
The Declaration of Independence - EXPLAINED
STENBERG v. CARHART :Justice Scalia, dissenting. If only for the sake of its own preservation, the Court should return this matter to the people-where the Constitution, by its silence on the subject, left it-and let them decide, State by State, whether this practice should be allowed. Casey must be overruled.
How Not To Overturn Roe v. Wade
The unstated premise of those who have adopted this strategy is that the Justices do not understand the nature of abortion, and that if they are forced to confront the scientific and medical facts about the conception and development of the unborn child, they will be compelled to reconsider Roe v. Wade and hold that the unborn child is a constitutional person. To speak in spiritual terms, the critics assume that the problem lies in the intellect rather than the will. That premise is mistaken. Every member of the Court understands what an abortion is. If there was any doubt about this before, the Court’s decision in Stenberg v. Carhart two years ago, striking down Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion law, should have laid that doubt to rest. The majority opinion’s cold and clinical description of various abortion methods betrays no ignorance of the nature of abortion. The Court understands that the purpose and effect of an abortion is to kill an unborn (and, in some instances, a partially born) child. Whatever reservations some members of the Carhart majority may have about the morality of abortion in general or the partial-birth technique in particular, those reservations have not affected their collective judgment that women need abortion to be legal in order for them to be full and equal members of American society. It is that judgment, and not any misunderstanding of what happens in an abortion, that is the source of our present predicament, as even a casual perusal of the Court’s opinion in Casey reaffirming Roe v. Wade would disclose.
Constitutional Persons:An Exchange on Abortion
...Roe had nothing whatever to do with constitutional interpretation. The utter emptiness of the opinion has been demonstrated time and again, but that, too, is irrelevant. The decision and its later reaffirmations simply enforce the cultural prejudices of a particular class in American society, nothing more and nothing less. For that reason, Roe is impervious to logical or historical argument; it is what some people, including a majority of the Justices, want, and that is that. If Mr. Schlueter were entirely correct in his constitutional argument, nothing would change. Only a shift in the culture, reflected in our politics, can make a change. Perhaps Roe may one day be whittled away by new appointees to the Court, though unless an unforeseeable cultural-political shift occurs, such candidates will have great difficulty in winning Senate approval. Dim as are the prospects for the demise of Roe, it is not imaginable that any Justice, let alone five of them, would rule that the Constitution prohibits all abortion, no exceptions. Schlueter's argument will never be more than a curiosity.
...I think it clear that the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, one way or the other, leaving the issue, as the Constitution leaves most moral questions, to democratic determination. I am, therefore, one of those whom Mr. Schlueter criticizes as restorationists: Roe should be overruled and the issue of abortion returned to the moral sense and the democratic choice of the American people.
----Robert H. Bork
Why Are We Paranoid About Efforts To Destroy The Second Amendment ...
The founder of Handgun Control, Pete Shields, was quoted in the New Yorker Magazine, June 26, 1976, pg. 53. 'One Step at a Time'
"We'll take one step at a time, and the first is necessarily - given the political realities - very modest. We'll have to start working again to strengthen the law, and then again to strengthen the next law and again and again. Our ultimate goal, total control of handguns, is going to take time. The first problem is to slow down production and sales. Next is to get registration. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and ammunition (with a few exceptions) totally illegal."
Ninth Circuit Asked to Reconsider State’s Gun Laws, Second ...
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was asked yesterday to reconsider its Dec. 6 ruling that individuals have no right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.
In ruling 2-1, the court upheld California’s ban on assault weapons. The ruling and the 70-page opinion by Judge Stephen Reinhardt was seen by many observers as a response to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s endorsement of a Fifth Circuit decision that went the other way.
Reinhardt said the Second Amendment never was meant to guarantee gun rights to individuals, but only to state-run militias like the national guard.
Curious. I do not know of anything on the Supreme Court that identifies it anywhere as a "Marble Temple." There is only one building in Washington, D.C. that does that and it is at the opposite end of the mall.
Wish there were more discussion of it.
Cheers,
Richard F.