(HOST) The Supreme Court has been much in the news this week with its ruling expanding gun rights, and the Senate hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. This morning commentator and veteran ABC News foreign correspondent Barrie Dunsmore offers his thoughts on these matters.
(DUNSMORE) It is hard not to be cynical about the process of Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominees. At his hearing five years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts told the Judiciary Committee that he accepted the principle of "settled law" and that he was not a judicial activist. In other words, he strongly implied that he generally opposed the overturning of decades of existing legal precedent. However, within the past year the Roberts-led Court has twice gone out of its way to make landmark decisions that do precisely that.
By ruling that corporations have the same freedom of speech rights as individuals, his Court set aside nearly a century of law by giving corporations the right to make unlimited political campaign contributions. In the process the Court has trashed efforts to limit the power of big money in elections.
This past week the Roberts Court finished the job of creating a new right of an individual to gun ownership that cannot be unduly restricted by Congress, states or cities. That puts into question virtually every gun control law in the country.
So much for what Roberts testified, under oath, about "settled law."
I am not a gun control nut, but I have lived and worked in lawless places where everyone has a gun. I thought fellow foreign correspondent David Ignatius put it well in a column this week in the Washington Post. He suggested the new Court ruling would likely lead to much more gun ownership in a country that already has too many guns. In Ignatius’ words, "Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts and other enthusiasts of our newly created right to bear arms should take a trip to Beirut or Baghdad to see how this works out in practice."
I can tell you from first-hand experience, Beirut or Baghdad or anywhere else where everyone has a gun are not places you want to live or raise children. Yet consider how absurd the argument for unlimited gun rights has become.
A few weeks ago a number of Republican Senators were decrying the fact that suspects arrested as terrorists were being read their Miranda rights to remain silent. They argued that this Constitutional right should be stripped from such people whether or not they were American citizens.
However, when it was suggested that it might be prudent to prevent anyone on the terrorist watch list from buying a gun, those same Republican Senators did a one-eighty, arguing this would be an unacceptable infringement of the Constitutional right to bear arms.
Such a selective view of Constitutional rights is breathtaking.
Given this country’s history of political assassinations and the gang wars that today plague major American cities, you would think some form of gun control would be desirable. But the National Rifle Association has totally cowed the political leaders of both parties, And the Supreme Court has now adopted the NRA’s position on the second amendment. So, for now, at least, gun control is effectively dead.