rssSessions: Considering Foreign Law Would Kill Second Amendment Rights
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 11:49 am
- 8 Comments
Perhaps unintentionally, the written followup questions from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor make a strong case that consideration of foreign law in the debate over the Second Amendment would doom Republican efforts to read a “fundamental right” to gun ownership into the Constitution.
As Sessions pointed out in his question:
Many countries around the world … including some of our closest allies, take a far different view from our own country’s regarding gun ownership. Great Britain has almost a total ban on the ownership of firearms, Germany has some of the most restrictive firearms ownership laws in Europe, and in Australia, self defense is not considered a legitimate purpose for owning a gun.
What’s more, he wrote:
On October 31, 2008, members of the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution supporting the negotiation of a global treaty on the gun trade. The United States was one of only two countries that voted against the resolution.
Sessions went on to ask Sotomayor if she would consider foreign law as a Supreme Court justice deciding whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to gun ownership in the United States, suggesting, of course, that such consideration would be heresy. (“Isn’t foreign law then simply a vehicle by which judges indulge their own policy preferences?” Session asked.)
Sotomayor was characteristically careful in her response, noting that because “cases raising Second Amendment questions are currently pending before the Court, I would not comment on how I would decide those cases if I am confirmed.”
She did say, however, that while she wouldn’t rely on decisions of foreign courts as controlling precedent, in “some limited circumstances, decisions of foreign courts can be a source of ideas, just as law review articles or treatises can be sources of ideas.”
So now we know why Sessions, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and many other Republicans were so adamant that Sotomayor not “use” foreign law. Not only did it recently help ban the execution of juvenile delinquents, but it could assist the court in denying them their coveted fundamental right to assault weapons as well.
8 Comments
Comment posted July 21, 2009 @ 7:36 pm
Jeff Sessions is the pride of his Klavern and the envy of his trailer park.
Comment posted July 22, 2009 @ 2:11 am
” . . . Republican efforts to read a “fundamental right” to gun ownership into the Constitution. . .”
What bias is revealed in that sentence! There is no need to READ a fundamental right into the constitution, it's already there. The first ten amendments are already understood to be fundamental. In any case, the question of whether there is an individual right to keep a handgun for immediate use for self defense has been settled in Heller vs DC. where the majority found:
“In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun
possession in the home violates the Second Amendment,
as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful fire-
arm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate
self-defense.”
Supreme Court of the United States, 2008
What right could possibly be more fundamental than the right to protect one's own life?
Comment posted July 23, 2009 @ 9:07 pm
The “coveted fundamental right” to keep and bear arms is already listed in a short, but important, list (original copy on file in the National Archives). On the other hand, while “cruel and unusual punishment” is banned on that same document, our Bill of Rights doesn't prevent that “new-fangled” European legislation the author embraces.
Consideration of foreign law in the interpretation of our Constitution should be a concern to anyone who believes in even-handed justice. Mechanisms are long in place to “change” our Constitution, but are seldom successful because citizens are, wisely, seldom convinced of an amendment's merit. So it should be.
Comment posted July 23, 2009 @ 9:45 pm
I like the way that you ridicule a man that expects a Justice to consider the Bill of Rights as Fundamental to the Constittution. And I expect good-hearted Americans living in trailer parts appreciate your elitism as well.
Comment posted July 25, 2009 @ 1:57 am
But the Klavern part was just dandy for you. Okay, noted.
Oh, and Sessions doesn't give a fig about the Bill of Rights and never has. Although being the envy of your trailer park isn't necessarily a bad thing, you sure seem to have construed it that way which says everything about where you're coming from. So who is the elitist here?
Comment posted August 5, 2009 @ 2:59 am
No, horse's ass.
It is not about that boogeyman called “assault” weapons, which generally can merely mean those weapons that are big and scary to liberals and more complicated than a Colt .45.
What it DOES mean, and why the good man from Oky was concerned, is that there is precedent in international law to the effect of banning ALL manner of guns in private hands.
Period.
I believe our own Mr. Koh thinks this as well.
The UN and other international agencies seeking to remake the world in the frowsy image of the EU, are filled to the rafters with ideas about telling nations not only about the baddy-bad stuff, but have now taken to creating legal opinions on things like banning, say, homeschooling and weapons and other somewhat more personal issues we dare not take for granted.
Treaties ratified by the US Senate ARE binding. And they can and DO supercede US Constitutional law if so. Word to the wise.
Comment posted August 5, 2009 @ 3:03 am
It would be more fair to say that YOU, like the ACLU, love to cherrypick what is fashionable for your own tastes from the Bill of Rights.
Interesting as a side note, BTW, the Second is the….well….SECOND, and not the Tenth.
It seems the issue of “rights” for this one was Second to the Founders only to freedom of expression and religion (now routinely mocked by major media outlets, of all places) but this observation misses much of the Left for some reason.
Perhaps because their own interpretation, a la the wise Latina, is that the Constitution actually reads in some secret place that “this applies only to what liberals would like to see happen.”
Yeah. Noted.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
