Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea predicted during a campaign stop this week that the Supreme Court is far more likely to make a “definitive ruling” in favor of gun control in the absence of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.
“With Justice Scalia on the bench, one of the few areas where the court actually had an inconsistent record relates to gun control,” Clinton told voters on Thursday, while stumping for her mother in Maryland.
Clinton continued, claiming that a number of anti-gun groups see an opening now for gun control laws to pass the high court without trouble.
“If you listen to Moms Demand Action and the Brady Campaign and the major efforts pushing for smart, sensible and enforceable gun control across our country … they say they believe the next time the court rules on gun control, it will make a definitive ruling,” she said.
Scalia authored the majority opinion in the 2008 ruling on District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Court overturned 5-4 a ban on handguns in the nation’s capital as unconstitutional. “There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms,” he wrote at the time.
If Clinton succeeds in her bid to the White House, and Republicans continue to block President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, chances are she would put forth a new nominee who has a record of favoring gun control.
“This is one of those issues I didn’t know I could care more about until I became a mother,” her daughter said Thursday. “I think every day about the Sandy Hook families, whose children every day don’t come home from school, and I can’t even imagine that living horror and tragedy.”
