4-4? 5-3?
They denied certiorari. So, I guess that means less than 4.
Here is our blueprint to attack Congressional and Senate Republicans and force reforms. And am I the only one who has noticed they are starting to buckle?
The SCOTUS is so much better now that scags is long dead!
I read that thomas plans on retiring soon too!
Just imagine NO MORE right-wing whack job SC! “wouldn’t it be lovely”
Don’t play with me. Really, my hopes are fragile. 
The rumor was floated yesterday, but Thomas’s wife has already shot it down.
This is one small step. It won’t stop lucrative trafficking in assault weapons from all the states with no assault weapon bans to NY and CT.
We need a national policy that bans these weapons and a strong federal agency to enforce the ban with real criminal penalties, but this is a pipe dream with the current NRA-led GOP Congress.
I’m hopeful the reporting was accurate, although mrs. thomas said it wasn’t so this morning.
But, I’m thinking now that his puppeteer dropped dead, there’s not much for thomas to do.
No chance Thomas retires.
If he retires, none of his “friends” in the Right-Wing will answer his phone calls.
His importance rests entirely upon his office.
I don’t understand. The late sainted Antonin Scalia publicly stated that his view of the Second Amendment was that anything that an individual could personally carry, including rocket launchers, were included by the term “bear arms.”
Isn’t Scalia’s opinion de facto law? How dare this liberal court suggest otherwise?
Awaiting the outcry from the NRA and gun fanatics:
“Who cares what the SCOTUS thinks? Since when do they get to decide what is and isn’t constitutional?”
It’s a common misconception that Thomas was just Scalia’s parrot. It’s far from the truth. Thomas is actually way WAY more reactionary and crazy than Scalia was. A couple of examples:
In Morse v. Fredrick (the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case), the Court held that, while high school students did generally enjoy freedom of speech in school, the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner fell outside of that protection. Scalia joined this majority viewpoint. However, in his concurrence, Clarence Thomas stated he would have gone much further, overturning a 1969 case that found that students enjoy free speech protections at all while in school.
Another case in point: In Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel, in a concurrence, Clarence Thomas stated that, were it up to him, he would overturn a 200-year-old precedent interpreting the Ex Post Facto clause to only apply in the criminal context.
Basically, Clarence Thomas does not believe in stare decisis. Scalia, for all his right-wing reactionary nonsense, did not go that far.
Scags or his lobbyist wife. Either way, one of his puppeteers is dead!
So if states can constitutionally ban these weapons, why can’t the President ban them nationally via Executive Action? Or would the Court consider a national ban to be somehow different than when individual states do it?
Scalia is a ratfuck.
Sorry, a dead ratfuck.
It’s not a question of the constitutionality of such a ban. In NY and CT, the legislature passed a law banning these weapons, and the Governor in each case signed it into law. The President has no legal authority to enact such a ban unilaterally.
Scalia’s opinion in Heller was directed at a ban on handguns, which he believed were an essential self-defense weapon. He misread the Second Amendment to arrive at the conclusion that the Amendment created an individual right of gun ownership, without regard to the plain language that indicates that it applies to militias, not to some “self defense” justification.
The Heller decision makes little sense. It ignores the text of the Second Amendment, and it draws an arbitrary distinction between handguns and other firearms. It does not, for example, render the National Firearms Act unconstitutional. By Scalia’s logic [sic], it would be impossible to ban machine guns, since an individual might wish to defend his home with one. But no one is seriously challenging that ban.
In short, Heller is a mess.
What we need is a ban on large capacity, and quick change magazines. A ban on assault weapons does absolutely nothing except make the ignorant feel good. A semiautomatic rifle with a 30 round magazine does exactly what an AR15 does, except look scary to many liberals. Handguns are the real threat anyway, but a magazine ban could cover them as well.
It could also mean that the K-RAT was ready to hear it, but discussions made it apparent that the final vote would be K-RAT vs sanity unless a ninth justice were confirmed. Roberts has hinted that they are discussing everything closely. The docket for the next term is looking as skimpy as the chord changes of a garage band: I think he is withholding his vote for certiorari on issues where there will be no decision.
As big an asshole as Roberts is (and, no, he’s a bigger asshole than that) he is concerned about the Court’s reputation. Tied decisions do not enhance that reputation.
I’d really like to find a good history or gun laws in the US, particularly how the 2nd amendment became such a rallying cry for gun owners. Agree with your assessment of Heller, and what fascinates me is how the 2nd amendment was ever attached to individual owners.
There were no gun ownership restrictions in place when the amendment was passed. It what was a mostly rural and even frontier environment, it was pretty much expected you would have a gun for both hunting and defense. The 2nd amendment was all about preserving both State militias and access to their armories, and was a direct result of Colonial governors such as Spottswoodie in Virginia denying that access. The southern states pushed very hard for this, because they needed militias to quell long-feared slave revolts; for the same reason, both Virginia (VMI) and South Carolina (The Citadel) created state military academies.
How we got from there to Heller is one hell of a long leap, and I’d like to understand it better - any suggestions welcome.