NY Times: Ruling on guns draws rebukes from the right.

[muntrv]

Ruling on Guns Elicits Rebuke From the Right

By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — Four months after the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess guns, its decision is under assault — from the right.

Two prominent federal appeals court judges say that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller, is illegitimate, activist, poorly reasoned and fueled by politics rather than principle. The 5-to-4 decision in Heller struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

The judges used what in conservative legal circles are the ultimate fighting words: They said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Scalia has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.

Comparisons of the two decisions, then, seemed calculated to sting.

“The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins,” one of the two appeals court judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote in an article to be published in the spring in The Virginia Law Review.

Similarly, Judge Richard A. Posner, in an article in The New Republic in August, wrote that Heller’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.”

Sharp criticism of a recent Supreme Court decision by federal appeals court judges is quite unusual, though these two judges — both Reagan appointees — are more outspoken than most.

SEE MORE AT LINK BELOW

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/washington/21guns.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th

[ManiacJoe]

1. Duplicate. See the ongoing thread at

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x188245

[desktop]

2. The right is correct about the Supreme Court. It is an activist court.

Scalia and Clarence Thomas in particular are activist judges, interested in their far rightwing agenda first, constitution and the rule of law aren't even a close second.

[tburnsten]

3. Not sure I understand

As far as the Heller case goes, nothing else, can you please elaborate? It doesn't seem to me that taking the Constitution at face value, i.e. when it says "the people" it means "the people", as the counterpart to "the government", and when it says "keep and bear arms" it actually is protecting private ownership, because it would be retarded to waste paper explaining that the government has a right to own weaponry in a document outlying restrictions on government power over individuals. If "the people" meant "the state" in the second amendment, it would have to mean "the state" in the rest of them. Replace "the people" in the entire bill of rights with "the state". It reads like a dumb joke.

[iverglas]

4. third time lucky?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x188245

and the other.