The NRA announced its strong opposition to the confirmation of Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court in a letter to the U.S. Senate on July 1. Today, they announced the release of a television ad:

Both her political career in the Clinton Administration and her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee make it clear that Kagan would be a serious opponent of our Second Amendment Rights.

Last year, Sonia Sotomayor deliberately misled the American people by claiming she believed it was “settled law” that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. This year, she proved she never really believed that by voting against the Second Amendment in McDonald v. City of Chicago.

Elena Kagan used the same phrases – “settled law” and “precedent” – to describe her view of the Second Amendment in the hearings. It is critical that the members of the U.S. Senate not fall for the same trick twice….

Here’s the ad that the NRA will be airing across the country. Watch, and then contact your Senators at 202-224-3121 (Senate switchboard) or look up their email and office phone numbers here — Senators of the 111th Congress. Urge them to oppose and filibuster Kagan’s confirmation. The future of our Second Amendment rights depends on it!

For more detail read — NRA Opposed To Kagan Nomination To U.S. Supreme Court.

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

 

In a 5 to 4 decision announced by Justice Alito the Supreme Court decided McDonald v. Chicago in favor of Chicago resident Otis McDonald. McDonald was represented by lawyer Alan Gura, who had argued and won D.C. v. Heller in 2008, exactly two years and two days ago.

Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas supported the Second Amendment. Despite the recent death of her husband, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to vote against gun rights. Justices Breyer and Stevens both voted against gun rights and wrote dissenting opinions. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor concurred with Breyer’s dissent.

Wikipedia — McDonald v. Chicago, read this for complete background.

On June 28, 2010, the High Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Second Amendment was incorporated under the Fourteenth Amendment, striking down Chicago’s gun restrictions.

NRA-ILA — National Rifle Association Hails Historic Victory:

National Rifle Association Hails Historic Victory on Second Amendment Freedom in McDonald v. City of Chicago
Monday, June 28, 2010

Fairfax, Va. — The National Rifle Association of America today praised the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in another landmark Second Amendment case. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies not just to Washington, D.C. and other federal enclaves, but protects the rights of all Americans throughout the country. The opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago brings an end to the nearly 30 year-long handgun ban that the city has imposed on its law-abiding citizens….

As a party to the case, the NRA participated in oral arguments before the Court in March. The NRA persuasively argued that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment and that handgun bans, like those in the City of Chicago and the Village of Oak Park, are unconstitutional under any standard of judicial review. This same view was shared in friend of the court briefs by a bipartisan group of 309 members of Congress from both chambers, 38 state attorneys general, and hundreds of state legislators. Public opinion polls show that it is also shared by the overwhelming majority of the American people….

Oral arguments transcript (PDF) — Here.

Cornell University Law School — Syllabus: M c DONALD et al. v . CITY OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, et al.

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.

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

A storm is brewing — clouds are again gathering over gun rights.

After health care and cap and trade, the next major battle will be gun control. The antis are adept at coordinating news stories to editorials to columnists to the legislature and they follow a predictable pattern. Typically, it starts with a high profile news story. That is followed by media hype through the editorial page. Then the columnists get in gear to demonize the gun, gun owner, the NRA and decry the laxity in guns laws that if only were made more sensible, all the carnage would never happen.

The difficulty is that this strategy consistently and completely misses the mark. None of the laws proposed will have one ioita of effect upon the criminal and serve only to impede the law abiding. And that, my friends, is precisely the point. Gun control is not about guns — it is about control.

Currently, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY4th) have introduced The Gun Trafficking Prevention Act of 2009. The bill is enthusiastically supported by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) lobbying group and a host of anti-gun individuals and organizations.

You can track the progress of this legislation at Open Congress, and the website also offers you an opportunity to vote whether you support or oppose the bills:

• In the Senate — S.2878
• In the House — H.R.4298

While professing to protect the law abiding, this bill would ultimately require a National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) background check for every firearm transfer including private sales and gifting to a family member. It would also spend upwards of $370M to fund an additional 500 ATF agents. This would place every dealer transaction under an unparalleled level of scrutiny and red tape. More ominously, it would allow the US Attorney General (Eric Holder) discretionary authority to impose “special restrictions” on so-called high risk dealers. These are sensible and reasonable? I think not. Gillibrand knows that if you can choke off the dealers, you can choke off the supply.

Enter Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne Jr. He not only thinks laws like this are reasonable, he would have you believe large numbers of NRA members disagree with NRA leadership and are in favor of such “sensible” laws.

Beyond the NRA’s absolutism
By E.J. Dionne Jr.  |  Thursday, December 10, 2009

The National Rifle Association wields power that would make an Afghan warlord jealous because the organization is thought to command legions of one-issue voters ready to punish any deviationism from the never-pass-any-new-gun-laws imperative. Many legislators fear that casting a vote for even a smidgen of restraint on weapons sales could be politically lethal.

But imagine if NRA members were more reasonable than the organization’s leaders and supporters in Congress in understanding the urgency of keeping guns out of the wrong hands.

NRA leaders, meet your members.

It turns out that the people in the ranks actually are much wiser than their lobbyists. In a move that should revolutionize the gun debate, Mayors Against Illegal Guns decided to go over the heads of Beltway types and poll gun owners and NRA members directly….

In his survey of 832 gun owners, including 401 NRA members, Luntz found that 82 percent of NRA members supported “prohibiting people on the terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns.” Sixty-nine percent favored “requiring all gun sellers at gun shows to conduct criminal background checks of the people buying guns,” and 78 percent backed “requiring gun owners to alert police if their guns are lost or stolen.” Among gun owners who did not belong to the NRA, the numbers were even higher….

I think these supposed NRA members are what Rush Limbaugh refers to as seminar callers. You know, the ones who say “I’m a Conservative, but I think we’ve really missed the boat on this one.” Dionne would have you believe that a survey company, with no access to NRA membership lists, can randomly survey 832 gun owners and come up with 401 NRA members. If we assume a population of 100 Million gun owners and 4 Million NRA members, the probability is remote that you could draw a 48% (832/401) relationship sample out of a 4% population (100M/4M). You don’t suppose the left would distort and make up the numbers to make their case, do you?

Gillibrand argues that her law would stem the flow of illegal guns to Mexico where our government recently reported tht 90% of crime guns recovered there were traceable to the US. That was clearly an abuse of statistics, a distortion and a lie. The correct number of 17% is still overstated because of a blatantly biased sample.

Doesn’t matter to the left or the state run media. They will continue to demonize, demagogue, distort and demean because the end justifies the means. Make no mistake. The end is your disarmament and their ever-expanding goal of government control. By the way, have you noticed the effort being put forth by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the UN to address international trafficking in small arms?

The storm pressure is building.