Amy Coney Barrett had to know what kind of a firestorm she was walking into when she accepted President Donald Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court. After all, Brett Kavanaugh could have given her the heads up if nothing else.
Right now, the Supreme Court appointment is triggering for a lot of groups. Barrett has opinions that some groups are less than thrilled with. In particular, anti-gunners.
In fact, she’s viewed as downright hostile to the anti-gun agenda.
Barrett sided with officers in finding a traffic stop reasonable even though the officers a year later didn’t remember stopping the suspects. In another case, she wrote that a detective who lied to get arrest warrant isn’t entitled to qualified immunity. In U.S. v. Terry, she found that police didn’t have the authority to search a suspect’s apartment because they failed to verify that the woman who let them in lived there. In U.S. v. Watson, she agreed with a suspect that the police didn’t have a reasonable suspicion to block his car based on an unreliable tip. Barrett is “open minded” and willing to rule against the government, said Georgia State law Prof. Eric Segall. Barrett’s dissent in a gun rights case indicates she has a “very expansive view of the right to bear arms and would very likely be hostile to gun control efforts,” said law Prof. Adam Winkler of the University of California Los Angeles. The majority upheld a ban on felons possessing firearms. Barrett’s dissent argued that such laws run afoul of the Second Amendment because there’s no evidence those who commit nonviolent felonies are dangerous.
Cam touched on this one yesterday, of course. Barrett found that a non-violent felon shouldn’t be barred from exercising their Second Amendment rights. Frankly, she’s right. They shouldn’t.
But the anti-gunners will continue to melt down because they’ll no longer have Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to stand against the right to keep and bear arms. Now, a full two-thirds of the Court will likely vote in a pro-Second Amendment manner, and that’s scaring the hell out of them right now.
Frankly, it should.
However, that will only matter if the Court actually agrees to take on a Second Amendment case. It remains to be seen if that will happen, of course, but it’s also possible that Barrett being on the Court may be enough to swing things so that they will. We can certainly hope so, anyway.
In the meantime, we can at least point and laugh as anti-gunners go completely ballistic (pun fully intended) over her nomination and the Senate’s decision to move to confirm as quickly as possible. It’s a beautiful thing, to be perfectly honest, but partially because so many anti-gunners are betraying their own hypocrisy.
They were fine with Obama nominating a justice when we all knew good and well his presidency was slated to last mere days, but now that Trump is facing an election–one he’s not guaranteed to lose by any stretch–they want everything to halt. Not only did it fail to cater to them, the Senate is looking to confirm a woman that makes the anti-gunner soil themselves.
It’s hard not to be amused.
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