The National Rifle Association has sent a “letter of opposition” regarding Elena Kagan’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court to the principals of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

The Honorable Patrick Leahy
Chairman
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
224 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable Jeff Sessions
Ranking Member
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
152 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Chairman Leahy and Ranking Member Sessions:

We are writing to announce the National Rifle Association’s position on the confirmation of Solicitor General Elena Kagan as Associate Justice ofthe United States Supreme Court.

Other than declaring war, neither house of Congress has a more solemn responsibility than the Senate’s role in confirming justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Senate considers the nomination of Solicitor General Kagan, Americans have been watching to see whether this nominee – if confirmed – would respect the Second Amendment or side with those who have declared war on the rights of America’s 80 million gun owners.

During confirmation hearings, judicial nominees make carefully crafted statements regarding issues with which they do not personally agree. They often speak in terms of “settled law” or “I understand the right”. When those statements are contradicted by an entire body of work over a nominee’s career, however, it would be foolhardy to simply take them at face value. In Ms. Kagan’s own words, “you can look to my whole life as to what kind of justice I would be.” We agree.

As she has no judicial record on which we can rely, we have only her political record to review. And throughout her political career, she has repeatedly demonstrated a clear hostility to the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

As a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Ms. Kagan said she was “not sympathetic” to a challenge to Washington, D.C.’s ban on handguns and draconian registration requirements. As domestic policy advisor in the Clinton White House, a colleague described her as “immersed” in President Clinton’s gun control policy efforts. For example, she was involved in an effort to ban more than 50 types of commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms – an effort that was described as: “taking the law and bending it as far as we can to capture a whole new class of guns.” And as U.S. Solicitor General, she chose not to file a brief last year in the landmark case McDonald v. Chicago, thus taking the position that incorporating the Second Amendment and applying it to the States was of no interest to the Obama Administration or the federal government. These are not the positions of a person who supports the Second Amendment.

During her confirmation hearings last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor repeatedly stated that the Supreme Court’s historic Heller decision was “settled law”. Even further, in response to a question from Chairman Leahy, she said “I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller‘.” Yet last Monday in McDonald, she joined a dissenting opinion which stated: “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes”.

We would also note that both Heller and McDonald were 5-4 decisions. The fact that four justices would effectively write the Second Amendment out ofthe Constitution is completely unacceptable. Ms. Kagan has repeatedly declined to say whether she agrees with the dissenting views of justices Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor, which leaves unanswered the very serious questions of whether she would vote to overturn Heller and McDonald or narrow their holdings to a practical nullity.

This nation was founded on a set of fundamental freedoms. Our Constitution does not give us those freedoms – it guarantees and protects them. The right to defend ourselves and our loved ones is one of those. The fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms is another. These truths are what define us as Americans.

Any individual who does not believe that the Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right and who does not respect our God-given right of self-defense should not serve on any court, much less receive a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. Justice Sotomayor’s blatant reversal on this critical issue requires that we look beyond statements made during confirmation hearings and examine a nominee’s entire body of work. Unfortunately, Ms. Kagan’s record on the Second Amendment gives us no confidence that if confirmed to the Court, she will faithfully defend the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms of law-abiding Americans.

For these reasons, the National Rifle Association has no choice but to oppose the confirmation of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. Given the importance of this issue, this vote will be considered in NRA’s future candidate evaluations.

Thank you for your attention to our concerns. Should you have any questions or wish to discuss further, please do not hesitate to call on us personally.

Sincerely,

Wayne LaPierre
Executive Vice President
NRA

Chris Cox
Executive Director
NRA-ILA

cc: Majority Leader Harry Reid; Republican Leader Mitch McConnell; Members of the United States Senate

 

So, you get a little snow and then you can suspend the Second Amendment! Amazing!!!! Who do they think they are? —- New Orleans??? From WXII Channel 12 News, Winston-Salem, NC — Residents Fumed Over Weekend Alcohol, Firearm Ban:

KING, N.C. — Residents in King were fumed over the weekend after a state of emergency declaration restricted the sale of alcohol and the carrying of firearms in vehicles.

King Police Chief Paula May said she’s received hundreds of threats related to the restrictions, which banned driving from 12 a.m. Sunday to 5 a.m….

Under North Carolina law, May said, when a state of emergency is put into place that includes a ban on driving, the sale of alcohol and carrying of firearms in vehicles is also banned….

Recently decided tenth amendment cases support constitutional challenges to ObamaCare. Here is evidence that my battle in Printz v. United States was not in vain, as so many liberals would have you believe! From FOXNews — An Obamacare Shocker:

….there’s another key provision in Obamacare that probably violates the Tenth Amendment: the state exchanges.

The Tenth Amendment went for so many years without being used to strike down any law that it came to be regarded as what is called a “dead letter” in the Constitution, meaning a provision that says some sort of obvious statement, but that isn’t actually used by the courts for anything.

Then, in the 1990s, the Supreme Court shocked the legal world by striking down two laws for violating the Tenth Amendment. The first was New York v. United States in 1992, where the Court struck down a federal law requiring states to pass state laws for the disposal of radioactive waste, and to issue regulations for implementing those laws. Then in Printz v. United States in 1997, the Court struck down a provision of the Brady Act — a federal gun-control law — that required state and local law enforcement to run background checks on handgun purchasers.

From these two cases emerged the anti-commandeering principle, holding that the Tenth Amendment forbids the federal government from commandeering — or ordering — any branch of state government to do anything. The states are sovereign and answer only to their voters, not to Washington, D.C.

Therein lies the problem for the Senate’s Obamacare bill. It requires each state to pass laws setting up a statewide non-profit insurance exchanges. It then requires the states to pass regulations for implementing those laws. And it further requires the states to dedicate staff and spend state money to administer those programs.

In most respects, this is a straight-out repeat of those 1992 and 1997 cases. The main difference is that Obamacare violates the anti-commandeering principle in a far more severe and egregious way than those previous laws ever did.

This is really stunning. If New York and Printz had been decided as far back as 1910, then maybe you could imagine Congress deciding to roll the dice with a completely new Supreme Court a century later. But these are recent cases with conservative outcomes, and the only difference is that the Court has become a bit more conservative then it was in the 1990s when it decided those two cases….

The only way the Dems can get around this is to drag out the constitutional challenges until Obama, in a second term as president, may have a chance to replace two conservative Supreme Court justices with liberals.

The American public must deny Obama a second term, and the certain destruction of states’ rights.

Wow………I have been right all along and the TSA IS incompetent!!!! I have seen other stories of people inadvertently getting something through security and then turning themselves in, only to be treated like a criminal. If a gun can make it through, what else???? It also proves the point that it isn’t objects that are dangerous, per se, it is people!

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.” ~~ Honore de Balzac

From the Missoulian — Man gets through Bozeman airport security with gun in carry-on bag:

BOZEMAN – The Transportation Security administration said Wednesday that screeners at Gallatin Field near Bozeman inadvertently allowed a passenger with a firearm in his carryon luggage through security last month.

The unidentified man realized he had the gun when he was in the boarding area Dec. 13 and turned himself into TSA officials.

Gallatin Field Board Chairman Dick Roehm said the TSA re-screened every passenger at the airport, including those on a Horizon Air flight that had left the gate but had not yet taken off – delaying three flights for more than an hour.

The gun was turned over to local law enforcement and the passenger was allowed to continue on the flight, TSA spokesman Dwayne Baird said in a written statement….

An analysis of the dissenting opinion in the case DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA V. HELLER has just been published in the Cardozo Law Review. Written by second amendment expert David T. Hardy, it is thorough and meticulous.

The dissent in “Heller” is laughably flawed and it scares me to think that those four liberal Justices are so stupid as to think we would stand for their outright mockery of the Constitution! Incredible!

Read it here:

DUCKING THE BULLET

From a simple man who loves God, his country, and his family … and this beautiful land.