“The People” — As individuals making up the larger entity knows as “The People”

There’s nothing revisionist about the 2nd amendment position as I argue it. Prior to the revisionism which followed Miller (far from clear, but a vague and incomplete decision if there ever was one), that the 2nd amendment protected an individual right was indeed the accepted view of the 2nd amendment - that “the people” in fact means, shockingly, “the people.” That indeed is a view reflected by the Founders’ writings, the early commentators, and Congress in its debates over the 14th amendment.

It was the overly broad reading of Miller’s very limted decision by advocates who wanted to cover a gun control agenda that is, in fact, revisionist.

And remember, the DC statute did more than just ban one type of weapon. It banned the possession ANY operable weapons. Long guns, to be legal, had to be disassembled or trigger-locked; hardly in an operable state. Even if one had a legal handgun (grandfathered in) it was a violation of law to move it from room to room in one’s own home under the DC statute as written. Let’s not misrepresent the ordinance at issue here.

You “threaten” to post Miller - hell, PLEASE post ALL of Miller. Be my guest. I dare ya, in fact. Then you can explain your reading of Miller in light of the numerous examples Miller cites where “the people” in fact means “the people.”

And no, I don’t “know it.” Please do not presume to tell me what I know. The Dec. 12, deadline, BTW, was one imposed by Florida law, not the SCOTUS. The complaints over Bush v. Gore are partisan, not principled. Partisanship masquarading as principle.

For all the Democratic Party whiners, this needs to be repeated again.

For your information, Regular, I am registered “unaffiliated” and voted for Nader in 1996 and 2000.

Gore won in 2000 but, more importantly, democracy lost.
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So your one of those people who can’t commit, but is a mouthpiece for Democratic Party issues eh?

How comfortable for you.

Obviously Gore didn’t win - so go back to sleep and smoke more of that Arizona peyote. You’re gonna need it to avoid reality yet once again.

For your information, Regular, I am registered “unaffiliated” and voted for Nader in 1996 and 2000.

Gore won in 2000 but, more importantly, democracy lost.

1) Miller is short enough that I could post the whole thing here (and get yelled at, but still). For you to claim that passage I posted somehow misrepresented the holding of the Court is ludicrous.

2) Haven’t had time to read the transcript of the oral arguments in Heller. I would note a few things. First, a law that outright bans any type of weapon naturally faces a heavier burden that mere regulation. Thus I see it quite possible that you will get 6 votes to overturn the ordinance. However, you won’t get six for the revisionist reasoning you’ve presented regarding the Urdugo case. That would require misrepresenting both the holding and the (mor relevant) dicta in that case.

3) It’s curious that you represent the Florica Supreme Court as “partisan.” How exactly is ordering a statewide recount of a hotly disputed election, using the only standard that was on the books–”clear intent of the voter”–partisan? Even assuming they were partisan, the previous remand from the Supremes didn’t leave them much wiggle room–though, as we saw, it turned out to be s sucker punch anyway!

Now compare that to stopping a state-ordered recount– in progress –on a Saturday –based on the “irreperable harm” it would do. To whom?? Naturally , the person who had been certified 535 votes ahead by Katherine Harris.

And then, of course, declaring, outrageously on Dec. 13 that the time had run out–after their own actions made certain that the deadline was not met. Even if one could somehow argue that Bush v. Gore made coherent sense, stopping the recount was dirty pool, and you know it.

I hope Eugene Scalia liked his job in the Bush administration.

Only one other Democratic Candidate has failed to win his home state in a Presidential Election, that was George McGovern.

It is indeed factual and more to the point of the final out come, that if Al Gore had won his home State of Tennessee, he would have won the election to the office of the President of the United States.

It’s that simple Libs, really it is.

Just a last passing thought - Are you saying, then, that a partisan Florida court is acceptable, while an allegedly partisan SCOTUS is not? Your objection, CF, then is based not on principle, but on outcome. Your objection is not that courts are partisan, but that the particular court you object to here was ‘partisan’ the wrong way.

Partisanship again trumps principle. I wish I could say I was shocked. But I’m not.

MOST cases are not particularly exceptional. In fact, the SCOTUS takes cases, typically, IN ORDER for them to serve as precedents, and writes opinions with that purpose. While cases are certainly fact-driven, the fact patterns are fairly predictable and the decisions applied to other similar fact patterns; i.e. the car stop search, the Miranda violation, etc.

Florida 2000 is quite different. It was entirely new for the courts to be appealed to on so clearly a political matter (and perhaps the court should have declined jurisdiction on those grounds, deferring to the Congress per Art. I) and involved a fact pattern involving a unique set of ballot problems; i.e. the infamous “hanging chad.” Even had the Court not inserted that line, the precedent value of Bush v. Gore is nearly nil, if any.

You missed the point, CF. Your claim is that the Florida election was “stolen” to take it from the “right” winner. The point is that the “right” winner is ultimately unknowable; under the best of circumstances (and Florida’s “intent of the voter” is hardly the best of circumstances) the vote margin was well inside any margin of error, whether for polls or actual ballots.

I’d be tempted to say that anyone who cannot clearly mark a simple ballot doesn’t deserve to be counted anyway, but . . . .

By that standard, what case would not be “an exceptional case, depending upon particular circumstances and facts?” I think the only “exceptional” thing involved was the majority’s rationale that the Equal Protection was needed to protect one candidate’s interests against the interests of the voters. If a ruling is pre-emptorily exempted from serving as precedent, that tends, does it not, GMC70, to undercut its claim to legitimacy.

What is interesting, GMC70, about your discussion of the “interesting thing” about the 2000 recount is that it EXACTLY confirms the rationale which Justice Stevens, in his dissent, imputes to the five-member majority.

“Finally, neither in this case, nor in its earlier opinion in Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd. v. Harris, 2000 WL 1725434 (Fla., Nov. 21, 2000), did the Florida Supreme Court make any substantive change in Florida electoral law.6 Its decisions were rooted in long-established precedent and were consistent with the relevant statutory provisions, taken as a whole. It did what courts do7–it decided the case before it in light of the legislature’s intent to leave no legally cast vote uncounted. In so doing, it relied on the sufficiency of the general “intent of the voter” standard articulated by the state legislature, coupled with a procedure for ultimate review by an impartial judge, to resolve the concern about disparate evaluations of contested ballots. If we assume–as I do–that the members of that court and the judges who would have carried out its mandate are impartial, its decision does not even raise a colorable federal question.

What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZD.html

As Justice Stevens concludes, what drove the decision was a distrust of the state judges as partisan. What resulted from the decision has been the discrediting of the Supreme Court as partisan. Way to go.

The failure of Gore to win Tennessee and call for a state wide Florida recount helped him to lose fair and square. He outsmarted himself. Wasn’t hard for him to do.

Oh well.

NONE of which we know would, or would not, have happened. The Clinton administration had evaluated Saddam’s regime much as did Bush, and a majority of congressional democrats voted to authorize the use of military force. BIll Clinton endorsed such a decision.

So the idea that absent Florida 2000 things would have been quite different is little more than guesswork and assumptions. It may have been, then again, it may not have been. We cannot know.

Nothing ridiculous about it.

And it’s not just you, Rage. Most of academia has misrepresented Miller for decades to serve an ideological goal of gun control. A reading of the REST of Miller makes that clear.

Still wanna make that bet on Heller? Even the legal minds who want the DC law upheld are assuming it won’t be - the DC law simply cannot be defended, constitutionally, with a straight face.

Obama, not surprisingly, speaks of “respect for the 2nd amendment” and upholding the DC law in the same breath. Talk about speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth . . .

What you REALLY need to remember is that Gore could have had a statwide recount if he had simply asked for it at the beginning. There was plenty of time. And that’s what Florida law called for. But that’s not what Gore wanted, he wanted selective recounts.

GORE effed up!!

move on

That’s easy. It is indeed an exceptional case, depending upon particular circumstances and facts. Duh.

The interesting thing about Florida 2000 is that NO recounting would likely ever get a clear “right” result; “intent of the voter” is an inherently subjective standard. Had the SCOTUS not ruled as they did, the recount ordered by the partisan Florida SC would be just as subject to the charge of “handing the election to their ideological brethren.”

This one will be hashed by historians and scholors forever. But it’s over, your whining notwithstanding.

BTW - the Roberts court has no “contempt” for stare decisis, any more than the Warren court, who often overturned previous precedent, did. Stare decisis does not mean “cast in stone,” unless we believe that previous courts are inherently superior to current ones. Would you have the stare decisis of Plessy cast in stone? Is that the respect for stare decisis you have in mind?

Or is it (shockingly) just respect for stare decisis you happen to agree with?

Yeah; if only the Supreme Court hadn’t stolen an election, the United States wouldn’t be mired in an unwinnable occupation in Iraq, and the budget deficit wouldn’t be where it is, and the economy perhaps wouldn’t be tanking due to the Fed’s failure to oversee Wall Street.

What you Wingnuts don’t get, outlander, and never will get, is that the “loser” (as you put it) in the Supreme Court’s decision wasn’t Al Gore: it was American democracy.

It had in it a character, Napoleon’s uncle. He was a loser. He obsessed often about a high school football game. If only the coach had put him in the 4th quarter of the championship game, they would have won that game and he’d have gone on to a great college and pro career, and right then he’d have been sitting in a hot tub with a couple of honeys.

Indeed: Al Gore did file in Leon County Circuit Court. I am wrong.

And it was George Bush who appealed the decision of the Florida Court to the United States Supreme Court. So is Antonin Scalia saying that the Supreme Court didn’t CHOOSE to take the case and to get involved in a State Court matter? And is Antonin Scalia saying that the petitioner to bring the matter before the Supreme Court was NOT George Bush?

Scalia’s answer frames the issue in a way that makes it seems as if the Supreme Court does not have discretion over which cases it doesn’t hear. This is obviously not the case.

So for Scalia to say that “Al Gore wanted this,” “my hands are tied,” or some other nonsense is a slick ruse to wash his hands of the decision to hear the case in the first place, and in the second, to absolve himself of his role in the 5-4 conservative majority’s decision to force through the results certified by Katherine Harris. The 7-2 doesn’t matter, GMC70: what matters is the 5-4 by which the Rehnquist Court forced through the results certified by a Bush partisan, by insisting on the narrowest of procedural grounds (there isn’t time for a recount) while sacrificing the overriding priority in a democratic society: counting the votes.

And then there’s THIS:

“Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”

If this ruling was such a legitimate exercise of judicial authority, GMC70, then why did it come with the proviso that it was NOT to be used as precedent for any further decision? That isn’t law-making: it’s exceptionalism masquerading as law. I believe this presages the Roberts Court’s contempt for stare decisis.

“Get over it,” GMC70, when a majority of the Supreme Court steals an election and hands it to their ideological brethren? Not on your life.

Until the “60 Minutes” interview, one might have thought there were things that Justice Scalia wouldn’t do or say because they would be beneath him. Then he said “get over it” to the citizens of Florida whose votes he voted to overrule.

GMC70, we will NEVER “get over it.” Maybe you should “get used to it.”

“P.S. I mulled over your late-nite “analysis” there GMC. A few tired observations.

1) It should be noted that, whoever initiated the case…”
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Yeah Rage, rock-solid argument by starting your counter with the phrase “whoever initiated the case.”

The base your argument on “whoever” of which you don’t have a “whenever” or “wherever.”

Ya know,

That’s a “whatever.”

Okay, counselor, call this an amended filing: what does that even mean? Are you saying they thought the recount was peachy, but they could find an appropriate remedy for. . .their own stopping the recount?? Or something different?

And by the way: I don’t think CF2K or anyone is challenging the Supreme Court’s Article III powers. That’s a straw man. Separation of powers issues are quite relevant (albeit, as usual, complex) but, even if the decision was squarely within the Court’s constitutional ambit, the constant revisionism we see these days will not go unchallenged.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/25/AR2008042503098.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

What Does a President Really Do All Day?

1) It should be noted that, whoever initiated the case, it was a statewide recount, ordered the Florida Supreme Court, that was stopped on a Saturday, 2 days before the deadline, by a five-justice majority. This is beyond dispute.

2) I saw Scalia throw out that 7-2 figure, and it didn’t make any more sense then than it does now. You previously accused me of misrepresenting the case, for daring to state what Justice Breyer explicitly stated in his dissent (and he happened to be right). You have also, ridiculously, accused me of mispresenting what U.S. v. Miller said, even though, as anyone who saw what I eventually posted can attest, it was written in about the most plain, blunt language that I’ve ever seen in any judicial decision.

So yeah, fine: you want respect for your view? Fine. Earn it. Details, please. I haven’t read Bush v. Gore in the better part of a decade, but I call bullshit.

Like when he stated–tonight–that torture was not punishment?

Maybe you’re a Cylon, GMC. . .