CT Blue

Across the left side of the blogosphere, tempers are running high. Supporters of each candidate are damning the other, and threatening to withhold their votes should the other side prevail. In the heat of the moment we forget that the difference between them is slight, and that a McCain victory may seal the fate of this country for generations.

Look no further than the Supreme Court, for which the bell may already have tolled. The Court is apparently poised to rule in favor of the NRA, and, for the first time, and in spite of the language and historical context, find that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to “bear arms”. Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, is sure “that the amendment’s framers wanted to assure the ability of ‘the remote settler to defend himself and his family against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears and grizzlies and things like that,’ as he phrased his concern with self-defense at one point”. Nowadays this apparently translates into the capability to blow away dozens of your fellow citizens.

The court is unfazed by the fact that by ignoring the introductory clause in the Amendment, it will be needlessly arming criminals. The government, which took a surprisingly reasonable (for the Bushies) position, pointed out that if the militia clause merely means that the type of arms Americans are allowed to bear are those of the same class that the 18th century militia bore, then the Amendment would now protect the right to bear machine guns. Counsel for the plaintiffs was surprisingly moderate too. He allowed that maybe you could forbid someone from bringing a gun to school. How reasonable. But then again, it was just a maybe.

This is an important battle lost to the crazies. There is hope, assuming we can replace one of these Supreme Idiots before they are allowed to do further harm. The Bill or Rights was originally not applied to the states. That is, it was considered a limitation on the federal government only. That’s why, for instance, many states had established churches long after the Constitution was adopted. States were free, as well, to limit speech as they saw fit. When the 14th Amendment was adopted, it was understood that certain rights established by the Bill of Rights were incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment and were thus binding on the states. E.g, no more established churches (I think they were all disestablished by that point, anyway) and no more suppression of speech. (That is now left exclusively to the feds, thank you very much). The protections in the Bill or Rights were not incorporated en masse, but on a case by case basis. The Second Amendment has never been incorporated into the 14th, and there are sound reasons to believe that it shouldn’t be, but of course those may cut no ice with the Roberts court.

This is a court that has steadily eroded those rights that we traditionally believe are at the true core of democracy. But they have no problem expanding a “right” that we can do without, and that no person with brains could imagine the founders intended that we have. I refuse to believe, for instance, that a man as fundamentally sane as James Madison would like the idea of giving individuals the absolute right to own and possess machine guns.

So if you are considering sitting this one out if your favorite moderate to centrist candidate doesn’t get the nomination, ask yourself this: How does the Republican establishment placate its nut job base? Take a look at the courts. They are half destroyed now. McCain will not hesitate to finish the job.