PA Bill Number: HR541
Title: Recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Description: A Resolution recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Last Action:
Last Action Date: Sep 27, 2024
Heller: Binding Precedent (ed. note: Hillary's Clueless) :: 10/21/2016
For a choice example of how Hillary Clinton tacks to the left instead of the center, feature her remarks last night in respect of the Second Amendment. It has been called by two of America’s greatest jurists — St. George Tucker and Jos. Story — the “palladium” of our liberties.
Chris Wallace, by far the best debate moderator in this campaign, asked Secretary Clinton about it, quoting her as saying only last year: “‘The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment.’” He added: “And now, in fact, in the 2008 Heller case the court ruled that there is a constitutional right to bear arms, but a right that is reasonably limited.”
What Mrs. Clinton could have said — and would have if she had an instinct for the center — is this: “Heller is settled law.” She could have marked that what Heller did was establish that the Second Amendment right, to keep and bear arms, is a right that inheres not merely in the “well-regulated militia” but in the people. It was based not only on a plain reading of the parchment that is the supreme law of the land but also on another body of law, the laws of grammar. The District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court made a point of this.
Where the Second Amendment says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” the grammar is clear. The militia may be the motive, but it is not a restriction, and, in any event, it is in the people that the right inheres. Heller came up in the confirmation hearing for no less liberal a justice than Elena Kagan. It was raised by that most liberal of Democratic senators, Patrick Leahy. He supported Heller. And so did Justice-to-be Kagan. She called it “binding precedent” and “settled law.”
Why couldn’t Secretary of State Clinton say that? As Mr. Leahy and Justice Kagan made clear, Heller isn’t, in fact, radical. As Mr. Leahy marked in his question, all the named party to the case, a retired security guard named Dick Heller, asked for was a permit to allow him to keep an assembled pistol in his home. It permits some — by no means infinite — room for Congress, and eventually by incorporation the states, to regulate guns. So why didn’t Mrs. Clinton respond to Mr. Wallace by saying that Heller is binding precedent and settled law?
The answer has to be that she doesn’t believe it. She is of the left. She claims to support the Second Amendment, but she doesn’t. She mocks Donald Trump for being unwilling to, say, say that he’s willing to accept the election result. Yet she is unwilling to say that the Supreme Court’s principal ruling in respect of the Second Amendment is binding precedent and settled law. It doesn’t really matter whether the loser of the election accepts the result. He can sulk till the end of time. But it does matter if the President of America has contempt for the binding precedents of the Supreme Court.
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/heller-binding-precedent/89767/
