I saw this article and must admit my initial thoughts are a bit skeptical.
Below is the text of an email I sent to a friend on that same article. After
considering it again, I haven't changed my mind.
I don’t think there is really that big of a mystery here (that is unless the
NRA changed it’s position). Couldn’t the Justice Department’s apparent
sandbagging of this case, and the Bush Whitehouse’s playing both sides of the
issue, be related to the NRA’s vehement objection to even having this case
before the Supreme Court? The NRA’s position, if I remember correctly, was to
have the case sent back down. I somehow doubt the Bush Administration was so
clueless that they let some “rogue” solicitor general file a position paper it
didn’t agree with on a case that gun rights people have been waiting for for
years and that has been this closely followed. Yet at the same time, Cheney
signed the other brief to give the White House political cover. AND Novak is
such a disingenuous (censored) that I wouldn’t be surprised if he put out this
column to provide the cover. Because, while it seems to be critical of the
Bush White House, it does give them the political cover. I honestly think the
NRA is behind this. Plus, on what should be the landmark Constitutional Case
of our generation – similar to Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board – in its impact on
what everyone assumed was legal precedent, the Justice Department doesn’t try
to fix its blunder by amending its brief? They are sandbagging this case.
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:50:45 -0500From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [EMAIL
PROTECTED]: Fw: Gun Battle at the White House?
Gun Battle at the White House?
By Robert D. NovakThursday, March 13, 2008; Page A17
In preparation for oral arguments Tuesday on the extent of gun rights
guaranteed by the Second Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has before it a
brief signed by Vice President Cheney opposing the Bush administration's
stance. Even more remarkably, Cheney is faithfully reflecting the views of
President Bush.
The government position filed with the Supreme Court by U.S. Solicitor General
Paul Clement stunned gun advocates by opposing the breadth of an appellate
court's affirmation of individual ownership rights. The Justice Department, not
the vice president, is out of order. But if Bush agrees with Cheney, why did
the president not simply order Clement to revise his brief? The answers:
disorganization and weakness in the eighth year of his presidency.
Consequently, a Republican administration finds itself aligned against the most
popular tenet of social conservatism: gun rights, which enjoy much wider
agreement than do opposition to abortion or gay marriage. Promises in two
presidential campaigns are being abandoned, and Bush finds himself to the left
of even Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
The 1976 D.C. statute prohibiting ownership of all functional firearms was
called unconstitutional a year ago in an opinion by Senior Judge Laurence
Silberman, a conservative who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
D.C. Circuit for 22 years. It was assumed that Bush would fight Mayor Adrian
Fenty's appeal.
The president and his senior staff were stunned to learn, on the day it was
issued, that Clement's petition called on the high court to return the case to
the appeals court. The solicitor general argued that Silberman's opinion
supporting individual gun rights was so broad that it would endanger federal
gun control laws such as the bar on owning machine guns. The president could
have ordered a revised brief by Clement.
But facing congressional Democratic pressure to keep his hands off the Justice
Department, Bush did not act.
Cheney did join 55 senators and 250 House members in signing a brief supporting
the Silberman ruling. Although this unprecedented vice presidential
intervention was widely interpreted as a dramatic breakaway from the White
House, longtime associates could not believe that Cheney would defy the
president. In fact, he did not. Bush approved what Cheney did in his
constitutional role as president of the Senate.
That has not lessened puzzlement over Clement, a 41-year-old conservative
Washington lawyer who clerked for Silberman and later for Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia. Clement has tried to explain his course to the White House by
claiming that he feared Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court's current
swing vote, would join a liberal majority on gun rights if forced to rule on
Silberman's opinion.
The more plausible explanation for Clement's stance is that he could not resist
opposition to individual gun rights by career lawyers in the Justice
Department's Criminal Division (who clashed with the Office of Legal Counsel in
a heated internal struggle). Newly installed Attorney General Michael Mukasey,
a neophyte at Justice, was unaware of the conflict and learned about Clement's
position only after it had been locked in.
A majority of both houses in the Democratic-controlled Congress are on record
as being against the District's gun prohibition. So are 31 states, with only
five (New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Hawaii) in support.
Sen. Barack Obama has weighed in against the D.C. law, asserting that the
Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms -- not just collective
authority to form militias.
This popular support for gun rights is not reflected by an advantage in the
oral arguments to take place Tuesday. Former solicitor general Walter
Dellinger, an old hand at arguing before the Supreme Court, will make the case
for the gun prohibition. Opposing counsel Alan Gura, making his first
appearance before the high court, does not have the confidence of gun-ownership
advocates (who tried to replace him with former solicitor general Ted Olson).
The cause needs help from Clement during his 15-minute oral argument, but it
won't get it if he reiterates his written brief. The word was passed in
government circles this week that Clement would amend his position when he
actually faces the justices -- which would be an odd ending to bizarre behavior
by the Justice Department. --
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