Obama’s End Run on the Second Amendment

The Supreme Court nominee is a gun-banning radical who has ruled that cities and states can disarm you.

from Pajamas Media
May 28, 2009
by Bob Owens

Long before he was the president of the United States or even the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama made his opposition to the Second Amendment of the Constitution painfully clear. As a director of the Joyce Foundation for eight years (1994-2002), Obama participated in the creation and funding of prohibitionist-minded anti-gun groups to the tune of millions of dollars. This fact does not surprise the millions of Americans who have responded to the threat by purchasing millions of firearms since the president was elected and who purchased at least 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition in December alone.

What far fewer Americans know about Obama is that he was one of the Joyce Foundation’s directors when they embarked on a plot to undermine the Second Amendment by targeting the Supreme Court of the United States:

The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are impartial and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend. …

The Joyce directorate’s plan almost succeeded. The individual rights view won out in the Heller Supreme Court appeal, but only by 5-4. The four dissenters were persuaded in part by Joyce-funded writings, down to relying on an article which misled them on critical historical documents.

Having lost that fight, Obama now claims he always held the individual rights view of the Second Amendment, and that he “respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.” But as a Joyce director, Obama was involved in a wealthy foundation’s attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court, buy legal scholarship, and obliterate the individual right to arms.

Voters who value the Constitution should ask whether someone who was party to that plan should be nominating future Supreme Court justices.

Voters, however, were all but completely unaware of the Joyce Foundation director’s attempt to undermine the Constitution and voted the unvetted candidate into the White House. Just more than seven months after Hardy’s warning, Obama stands on the brink of succeeding where he once failed, by nominating an anti-gun radical appellate judge by the name of Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court.

Ken Blackwell was among the first to sound the alarm on Sotomayor’s radical view of the Second Amendment and the threat her views pose to the Constitution.

The recent landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller put an end to decades of arguments regarding the meaning of the Second Amendment. In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS rejected the collectivist interpretation favored by gun control advocates such as President Obama, noting that the Second Amendment’s protection of the right of citizens to own firearms for private use is an individual right that predates the Constitution, with its authority tied directly to the natural right of self-defense.

Just six months after Heller, however, Sotomayor issued an opinion in Maloney v. Cuomo that the protections of the Second Amendment do not apply to the states, and that if your city or state wants to ban all guns, then they have the right to disarm you. Such an opinion seems to fly directly in the face of Heller, exposing Sotomayor as an anti-gun radical who will affirm full-on gun prohibitions and believes that you have no right to own a firearm, even for the most basic right of defending your family in your own home.

Maloney has now been appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case on June 26. If confirmed, Sotomayor would almost certainly have to recuse herself from Maloney, but her views that made her such an attractive candidate to an anti-gun president would be involved in deciding similar cases appealed to the court.

While at the Joyce Foundation, Obama failed in the organization’s plot to corrupt Second Amendment legal scholarship and undermine the decision-making processes of the Supreme Court. Now president, only a concerted effort by America’s gun owners may keep an anti-gun activist judge from claiming a seat on the Court itself.

After Heller, the ever-changing candidate Obama affirmed the individualist view supported by a growing majority of Americans and sought to reassure America’s gun owners that he was not about to disarm them. By nominating an activist judge who holds a radically different view, Obama’s affirmation has proven to be yet another promise with a short shelf life.
Media pundits and Beltway insiders alike are predicting Sotomayor will be confirmed by the Senate and take her seat on the Supreme Court.

American gun owners who elected pro-gun Democrats and Republicans to the Senate may decide to make an issue of Sotomayor’s radical prohibitionist views. If they do, that tide could just as soon turn quickly against her, ending her hopes of ruling against the rights of Americans to defend their families from the nation’s highest court.
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