NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by Charles L. Cotton »

Attached is a copy of the NRA's letter opposing confirmation Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I want to call your attention to this portion of the letter; everyone in Washington knows what this means:

  • 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
    .


Chas.
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Purplehood
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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by Purplehood »

That is one powerful statement. I like it.
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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by pbwalker »

Purplehood wrote:That is one powerful statement. I like it.
:iagree:

reminds me of an old saying that goes something like 'ya mess with the bull, you get the horns...' (the version I know gets a little more colorful ;-) )

Well done NRA!
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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by A-R »

I was just reading about the Sotomayor flip-flop described in the NRA letter in this column (below) ... I can only assume that nominee answers to Senators' questions during confirmation hearings are NOT under oath - otherwise I think she'd be ripe for an investigation on perjury charges (yeah yeah, i know, how outrageous of me to think that a FEDERAL JUDGE should tell the truth at her JOB INTERVIEW :banghead: ).

****

http://article.nationalreview.com/43732 ... h-goldberg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

June 30, 2010 12:01 A.M.

The Un-Borkable Elena Kagan
It doesn’t look like Kagan will be following the Kagan standard.

Jonah Goldberg

Say it ain’t so, Elena.

Elena Kagan thinks that the “Borking” of Robert Bork during his 1987 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court would deserve a commemorative plate if the Franklin Mint launched a “Great Moments in Legal History” line of dishware.

This is not the time to rehearse all the reasons why Kagan is wrong on that score. Still, there is one adverse result of the Bork hearings worth dwelling on. Bork was the last Supreme Court nominee to give serious answers to serious questions. But because he was successfully anathematized by the Left, no nominee since has dared to show Borkian forthrightness.


Consider Monday’s thunderclap from the judicial Mount Olympus: The Second Amendment right to own a gun extends to state and local government. Personally, I think Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate opinion in favor of the 14th Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause over the due-process clause was the better argument. But that’s a debate for another day.

The more newsworthy opinion came from rookie Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She concurred with Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent, which held that there is no fundamental right to bear arms in the U.S. Constitution. “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,” Breyer wrote for the minority.

But when Sotomayor was before the Senate Judiciary Committee one year ago for her own confirmation hearings, she gave a very different impression of how she saw the issue. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy asked her, “Is it safe to say that you accept the Supreme Court’s decision as establishing that the Second Amendment right is an individual right?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

Both Sotomayor and Leahy festooned their colloquies with plenty of lawyerly escape hatches. That’s why Leahy asked the questions the way he did, and that’s why Sotomayor answered them the way she did. It’s also why he spun her answers into more than they were: “I do not see how any fair observer could regard [Sotomayor’s] testimony as hostile to the Second Amendment personal right to bear arms, a right she has embraced and recognizes.” He made it sound as though she was open to an expansive reading of the Second Amendment when everyone knew she wasn’t. (As a judge, she was hardly a hero of the NRA.)

Here’s the point: Sotomayor wasn’t an exception to the rule; she was following it.

Although the Bork inquisition was a largely partisan affair, the consequences have yielded a bipartisan sham. Republican and Democratic nominees alike are trained to say as little as possible and to stay a razor’s width on the side of truthfulness. The point is not to give the best, most thoughtful, or most honest answer, but to give the answer that makes it the most difficult for senators to vote against you. It’s as if we expect nominees to demonstrate — one last time — everything we hate and distrust about lawyers before they don their priestly robes.

Nobody is shocked that Sotomayor has revealed herself to be the liberal everyone knew her to be. But the fact that everyone was in on the lie is just further evidence of the sham Supreme Court hearings have become. They are a nonviolent and fairly bloodless cousin to totalitarian show trials, where everyone follows a script and politicians pretend to be “gravely concerned” and “shocked” upon “discovering” things they already knew.

And that’s why Kagan should be the hero of this tale. She has vociferously argued that the “Bork hearings were great . . . the best thing that ever happened to constitutional democracy.” She has lamented how, ever since, the hearings process has become nothing more that “a repetition of platitudes.” Kagan once implored senators to dig deep into the nominee’s “constitutional views and commitments.”

Alas, it doesn’t look like Kagan will be following the Kagan standard. On Tuesday morning, she distanced herself as best she could from those views. And when asked by Sen. Jeff Sessions whether she is a “legal progressive” — something pretty much all objective observers and her own friends and former colleagues know her to be — the brilliant and scholarly Kagan claimed to have no idea what the term even means.

After his rejection by the Senate, Bork wrote a masterful book, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. The title of the book about Kagan might well be titled The Tempting of Kagan: The Political Seduction of the Process.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by Oldgringo »

Let's get real just for a little while.

Let's pretend that YOU (or I) were interviewing for a very well paid job for life. All of that job's benefits and perks will be available to you until your death with probably a sizeable payment to your heirs. Would we tell our interviewers what's really on our minds and in our hearts OR would we tell them what they want to hear?

Therein lies the problem and its within the US Constitution. Appointing Federal Judges for life is wrong, wrong and wrong.
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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by The Annoyed Man »

Oldgringo wrote:Let's get real just for a little while.

Let's pretend that YOU (or I) were interviewing for a very well paid job for life. All of that job's benefits and perks will be available to you until your death with probably a sizeable payment to your heirs. Would we tell our interviewers what's really on our minds and in our hearts OR would we tell them what they want to hear?

Therein lies the problem and its within the US Constitution. Appointing Federal Judges for life is wrong, wrong and wrong.
They can be impeached. I agree in sentiment with you, but I'm not sure I can agree in actual application. We are supposed to have an independent judiciary. It goes without saying that if a SCOTUS justice had to survive a politically motivated congressional review process every few years to stay on the bench, or if they could be replaced willy-nilly by every incoming administration, there simply would be no judicial independence. None. That they don't serve abbreviated terms, and that they can't be replaced by every incoming administration, and that they don't have to answer to Congresses which come and go is part of what lends some stability to government.

The best solution is to make sure that our children are properly educated in a literalist interpretation of the Constitution at every step of the way along their educational path. Of course, educators don't like that idea because it removes them as the final authority on what it all means.

The Constitution was deliberately written so that citizens with fairly basic reading and writing skills could understand it. Why? Because it belongs to them and not to the government, and as long as they understand their rights and the proper role of government to protect, not hem in, those rights, they'll never fall for ridiculous canards, and eventually some of them become Supreme Court nominees who have a proper understanding of the document and its role and purpose.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"

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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by Oldgringo »

The Annoyed Man wrote:
We are supposed to have an independent judiciary.

The best solution is to make sure that our children are properly educated in a literalist interpretation of the Constitution at every step of the way along their educational path.

The Constitution was deliberately written so that citizens with fairly basic reading and writing skills could understand it.
The older I get, the more I understand the recall "Vote of Confidence" regularly employed when the government does not follow the will of the people in other countries much older than the USA. It apears to me that the above salient points lifted from your thesis are not working - for whatever reasons.

Maybe Thomas Jefferson was right afterall? I think I'll go and :cheers2: with me.

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Re: NRA Letter Opposing Confirmation of Kagan

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Post by Mike1951 »

IMPEACH EARL WARREN
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