Writing at Fox News.com, that network’s senior judicial analyst—Judge Andrew Napolitano—declares in his opening sentence that Joe Biden’s “determination to use his powers as the chief executive of the federal government to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms…is a profound violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution.”
“This is not academic hairsplitting,” Napolitano explains. “If a right is personal or fundamental or pre-political or natural, then the government — state or federal — may not interfere with it absent due process.
“Stated differently,” he adds, “the government cannot constitutionally interfere with gun ownership by executive order or even legislation. It can only do so if the owner of the gun has used it to harm someone else, and then only after a fair jury trial.”
This comes one day after a group of far-left Democrat lawmakers announced legislation aimed at packing the U.S. Supreme Court by adding four positions to be filled by Biden in order to tilt the court back left, again, essentially making the court a legal arm of the Democrat party rather than a separate-but-equal branch of the federal government. Translation: It’s a power grab and at its core is fear within the “Party of gun confiscation” that the high court, with its current conservative majority, will accept Second Amendment cases and begin chipping away at the gun control laws that have eroded the right to keep and bear arms over the years.
Pressing issues need to be addressed including the right to carry in public—openly or concealed—a firearm for personal defense, and whether modern sporting rifles (so-called “assault weapons”) are protected by the Second Amendment.
Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, made that clear in a response to the announcement by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, New York Congressmen Jerrold Nadler and Mondaire Jones, and Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson of their “Judiciary Act of 2021.” While Nadler insisted this is not an attempt to “pack” the court, Gottlieb said bluntly, “That’s a lie and they know it.”
“Markey, Nadler and their cronies are furious,” he asserted, “that the Supreme Court now has a majority of justices who are determined to adhere to the Constitution instead of rewriting it from the bench to advance an anti-gun-rights agenda.
“This is,” Gottlieb observed, “an attempt to overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller and McDonald rulings affirming the individual Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”
The veteran gun rights advocate also noted the increasing likelihood that with its current majority, the high court may decide to accept Second Amendment cases, which it has been reluctant to do in the decade since the McDonald decision of 2010.
As Napolitano puts it in his Op-Ed, Biden’s recent pronouncement “perpetuates an attitude about the Second Amendment that was prevalent in state and federal officeholders in both major political parties from the FDR to the George W. Bush eras. That attitude was based on a misreading of the Second Amendment, which characterized the right to own a gun as a collective and not an individual, personal right.”
“At issue,” according to NPR, “is the makeup of the Supreme Court, where conservatives now have a 6-3 majority. Democrats and liberal activists say this ensures the high court will strike down almost any legal challenge to the Biden administration’s legislative priorities.”
But if those “legislative priorities” are unconstitutional, wouldn’t that be the Supreme Court’s job?
While Nadler claims this proposal is aimed at “restoring balance” to the court, Gottlieb had this to say: “Frankly, it is not simply disappointing but disgraceful that a cadre of anti-gun lawmakers would introduce such a thinly disguised scheme to turn the Supreme Court into a judicial branch of the anti-gun-rights Democratic caucus. Markey’s claim that this is an effort to repair a broken Supreme Court is preposterous. For the first time in decades, the Court is well prepared to handle important constitutional issues, and all the Democrats can think of doing is to seize the court in a legislative power grab.”
