Well the McDonald Decision is awesome, looks like Blog-Buddy Bob S.’s wife Kimberly is going through her pre-op for breast cancer surgery
Sounds like Bob’s in a similar boat as me, very good prognosis, but its no fucking fun, fer damn sure.
So send you wishes love, and prayers over Texas way for Kim and Bob!
Weer’d my friend,
Thanks for the kind words and thoughts.
Wish I could afford to celebrate McDonald properly — say a couple of rum drinks and a cigar — but have to be up at O’mygoshDarkThirty tomorrow morning.
Have a gin for me tonight.
Will do! You’ll be in my thoughts! Smooth Sailing Tomorrow, Buddy!
Congratulations.
The Second Amendment is now OUT of the hands of your local Sheriffs and Communities and will be entirely administered on a Federal Level by the BATFE/DOJ/Fed Courts.
Justice THOMAS wrote a proper dissenting agreement. Alito is a weasel and it doesn’t set a good precedent for firearms ownership.
It just says that the fedgov is supreme over States, neglecting that ugly Tenth Amendment, and that bit about limited powers.
I think people who think they won something might not have read to the end of the book.
Thomas,
I’ll disagree. I think we did win something — a step in the right direction.
No Court – Supreme or otherwise– is going to turn existing law upside down if they can avoid it.
What this decision did was provide the building blocks for thousands of other decisions.
Between it and Heller, there is the basis for bring back those others issues — the Tenth and limited powers.
Until we limit the right of the states to restrict our liberties, it is hard to tell the fedgov to butt out.
Potentially, thousands of other WRONG decisions.
It’s the old “scorpion and the frog” story, in my mind.
Time will tell.
RAIN–>PARADE
Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Roberts, held that the right to possess firearms is protected under the Amendment’s “due process of law” clause. Their argument for refusing to reconsider the Slaughter-House Cases is critically weak, however. The entirety of their decision is this:
We see no need to reconsider that interpretation here. For many decades, the question of the rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against state infringement has been analyzed under the Due Process Clause of that Amendment and not under the Privileges or Immunities Clause. We therefore decline to disturb the Slaughter-House holding.
In other words, even though the decision was wrong—so wrong that these four justices cannot even try to defend it—they will retain it because the Court has subsequently found (dubious) ways around it. This is not legal thinking—this is political expediency. On this method of interpretation, any error, no matter how major, can be kept on the books so long as some questionable alternative theory gets us to more or less acceptable political consequences. Just as in Slaughter-House, there is not a shred of legal, historical, precedential, or philosophical justification for the position that the Court takes—and, just as in Slaughter-House, the Court doesn’t even try to pretend that there is. So much for the “originalist” Supreme Court.
Only Justice Clarence Thomas was willing to hold that the privileges or immunities clause should guarantee individual rights against state and local governments
http://plf.typepad.com/plf/2010/06/mcdonald-v-chicago-guns-but-no-original-intent.html
Everybody go “High Five” over a SCOTUS DECISION that was decided to protect Federal Rights to DO WHATEVER THEY WANT???