“The Supreme Court should represent all of us. That’s how I see the Court,” replied Hillary Clinton to Chris Wallace’s query on the role of the courts. “And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on our behalf of our rights as Americans.”
Where to begin with that answer, asks the WSJ.
The Supreme Court doesn’t—or shouldn’t—“represent” anyone. In the U.S. system that’s the job of the elected branches. The courts are appointed, not elected, so they can be nonpartisan adjudicators of competing legal claims.
But last we checked, the Constitution protects everyone, even the powerful. The law is supposed to protect individual rights, not an abstraction called “the people.”
And then it went downhill from there. Hillary Clinton’s promise? To appoint judges who would essentially rewrite the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
For example, when asked about the 2008 Heller decision, which upholds an individual right to bear arms, Mrs. Clinton said she supports “reasonable regulation.” Her problem with Heller? It overturned a District of Columbia law intended “to protect toddlers from guns and so they wanted people with guns to safely store them.”
But wait, writes the WSJ.
Toddlers had nothing to do with it. What Mrs. Clinton calls “reasonable” was an outright ban on handguns. The D.C. law allowed the city’s police chief to award some temporary licenses—but not even the police officer plaintiff in the case could persuade the District to let him register a handgun to be kept at his home.
Anyone who did lawfully possess a gun had to keep it unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times, ensuring it would be inoperable and perhaps useless for self-defense. As Antonin Scalia wrote for the Heller majority, “Few laws in the history of our Nation have come close to the severe restriction of the District’s handgun ban.”
During the last presidential debate, Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she would neither support any restriction on abortion nor oppose any restriction on gun rights.
“Carhart, Citizens United and Heller were 5-4 decisions, and Mrs. Clinton wants each of them to be litmus tests for her Supreme Court appointments. She mocks Mr. Trump for saying he won’t abide by the election result, but she wants to rewrite the Constitution to fit her own political views.” Read more from the WSJ here.
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