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Connecticut Lawmakers Talk Constitution, But Ignore Key Part Of It

AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File

Connecticut lawmakers aren’t happy about Texas and its new abortion law. Granted, the law has nothing at all to do with them, but they’re still outraged by it.

That’s fine.

It also seems that there’s been a lot of talk about protecting the constitutional rights of women to get an abortion. Now, that’s kind of interesting to me. Not because of abortion in and of itself as a topic, but because the state of Connecticut is known to care little about other constitutionally protected rights.

Responding to the new law in Texas sharply restricting abortion, Connecticut Democratic State Chair Nancy DiNardo last week tried to rile up the party’s base. “Connecticut,” she said, “will never allow the activist Supreme Court to strip away reproductive rights from the women of our state.”

There’s nothing new to be said about abortion itself. But its politics will always produce new material — as DiNardo did last week. For a Supreme Court that discarded Roe and returned abortion law to the states would be no more “activist” than the Supreme Court that issued Roe and took the issue away from the states, where it had rested since the country’s founding.

Even liberal legal experts — including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — have acknowledged that quite apart from whatever abortion policy should be, Roe was legally unsound or at best a big stretch. That is, Roe was the product of an “activist” Supreme Court.

Last week DiNardo and all other leading Democrats in Connecticut ignored a chance to defend a constitutional right far more established than abortion. While neither the federal nor state constitution mention abortion, both guarantee the right to gun ownership. Even more explicit than the federal constitution’s Second Amendment, Connecticut’s Constitution says: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”

A gun-rights group, the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, brought a federal lawsuit against the police chiefs of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Waterbury for refusing to process applications for municipal gun permits, without which people cannot get state permits. The lawsuit details how applicants in the cities have been stalled for many months, even indefinitely.

The cities don’t deny this. In fact, one local official argued that the uptick in violent crime in his city superseded anyone’s constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

This from the same state frothing at the mouth regarding a “woman’s right to choose?”

Look, I’m not interested in getting into abortion. That’s not what we do here. However, as noted, even the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued Roe vs. Wade was on shaky legal ground. The Second Amendment, however, isn’t. It’s as clear as day what the amendment says and means.

Denying people the opportunity to obtain a firearm simply because you think crime rates are too high is probably not something that any court in the country would allow to stand. I can’t imagine even some of the more liberal justices of the Ninth Circuit agreeing with that one, for crying out loud.

The state of Connecticut could step in. They could create legislation making sure this doesn’t happen again. Instead, they’re worried about a law that only applies to people in Texas.

Then again, this is typical in so many anti-Second Amendment states. They talk about rights, but they only really care about certain rights. While you can argue most people on any point of the political spectrum do the same, we’re talking specifically about one’s Second Amendment rights.

You can’t act so brazenly to step on people’s specifically enumerated right to keep and bear arms and still pretend you give a damn about people’s constitutionally protected right to do anything. You just can’t. Not if you expect me to buy it.

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