Fox News is reporting that President Donald Trump has started leveling the playing field on the federal courts, nominating 11 candidates in an effort to fill some 120 openings and begin the arduous task of bringing the federal bench back from Barack Obama’s far left tilt.
This could ultimately benefit gun rights advocates like Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, who want the president to “make the Second Amendment great again.”
Quoting Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the Fox report suggested that Obama’s appointments were more committed to liberalism than the law of the land.
“President Obama understood the singular importance of the lower courts, which is why he was so vigorous in appointing judges with a greater commitment to the liberal political agenda than to our Constitution,” Hatch said in a statement released Wednesday. “The time has come to right the wrongs of the previous administration. These supremely qualified jurists will restore respect and credibility to the judicial branch by saying what the law is, not what it ought to be.”
It was no secret that many Second Amendment voters turned out last November not because they were enamored with Trump, but because they saw the Supreme Court and federal courts as critical to preserving the right to keep and bear arms. Hillary Rodham Clinton, they believed, would have loaded the courts with more anti-gun liberals who agreed with her statement, caught on audio during a private fund raiser in New York in 2015, that the Supreme Court was “wrong on the Second Amendment.”
Proof of the importance of Trump’s nominees to the Second Amendment community comes from Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice. She told The Hill that all of the president’s nominees must be scrutinized carefully, and then she let slip that one of Trump’s nominees — including Colorado Supreme Court Justice Allison Eid to fill the vacancy left by Neil Gorsuch on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — apparently passed a litmus test that includes “opposition to gun safety.”
Translation: Eid is likely to favor the Second Amendment over restrictive gun control. When liberals talk about “gun safety” they are talking about gun control.
The gun prohibition lobby is fearful that Trump will fill court vacancies with moderates and conservatives who will treat the Second Amendment equally to the other tenets of the Bill of Rights. That is, they regard the amendment as protective of a fundamental, individual civil right rather than a government regulated privilege.
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