Strict Construction, Conservative Style

This news, from the miserable Washington Times, because apparently no one else will cover it:

"Constitutional protections afforded by the Second Amendment include the right to buy and sell firearms, a federal appeals court ruled Monday...Monday’s ruling did not strike down the local zoning ordinance, but it does declare that the right to buy and sell firearms “is part and parcel of the historically recognized right to keep and to bear arms."

The "historically recognized" right to keep and bear arms.  Recognized by whom?  Of course, the second amendment does not even assert a right to own arms, only a right to "keep and bear" arms which, if you have read the Federalist papers, are to be supplied to the militias by the government.

So much for the intent of the founding fathers, or strict constructionism, when it stands in the way of what right wingers want.  This is just one more of an infinite list of examples proving that these guys don't give a damn about the Constitution, any more than they care about anything that prevents them from doing what they want.

Scalia, their great Constitutional genius, could only find an individual right to bear arms by explicitly claiming that the first half of the second amendment had no meaning at all.  That's how much respect they have for the Constitution, and this decision only extends their contempt for the plain words of the law.

Comments

Jerry Critter said…
Right wingers use the constitution like fundamentalists use the bible. They both sre wrong.
Green Eagle said…
I don't know if you saw comments I have made about this subject in the past. I believe that Republican political and legal argument has been heavily influenced by fundamentalist apologetics. The patently hypocritical method of reasoning from the desired results to the supposed facts has been imported from Evangelical Christianity into the Republican party, which has a whole base brought up as right wing Christians, who accept this as legitimate. So, not only do I agree with you, I believe it is not a coincidence, but a direct descent from Christian argumentation to Republican political behavior.
Magpie said…
The ignorant rabble that bitch about ‘freedom’ every other minute are generally only comfortable with authoritarianism. And more than that, an authoritarianism that demands nothing of them personally.
What does a Right wing Christian actually have to do to serve their idiot belief system? Nothing but show up to church occasionally and repeat abject nonsense, tolerate nothing that is different to themselves, be suspicious of the scientific processes that even makes their life possible, and hate everyone else. That’s it. That’s all of it.

About guns and just thinking out loud…
Can you, The People, not buy up all the legitimate manufacturers and pass a law making non-government production of firearms illegal? When Smith and Wesson co-operated with the Clinton administration the gun lobby turned on the company. If the government gets in bed with all of them then gun-fetishist losers will have no-one to go to but foreign brands and you slap such huge punitive tariffs on those that they become prohibitively expensive. Make it economically difficult to purchase these coward’s crutches.

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