While the President’s new executive orders on guns is the current target for all the heated rhetoric, both the left and right are missing the mark and ignoring the impact that federal judges will have on the gun legislation debate.
Shortly after the President surrounded himself with children at a signing ceremony for his 23 new executive orders on guns (while simultaneously reprimanding the NRA for using kids as pawns in a political fight), the media and the left predictably adopted their favorite Obama descriptors for the measure, “bold” and “historic,” while the right defensively shunned Obama’s actions as an affront to the Constitution.
But both the left and the right are over-reacting to President Obama’s orders and other proposals aimed at reducing gun violence.
Upon closer inspection, and in keeping with this White House’s tradition of making a lot of noise on important issues without actually doing anything to address them (see deficit), Obama’s executive orders on guns are not particularly daring. For example, the President’s demand that the Consumer Product Safety Commission review safety standards for gun locks and safes is fairly dull.
In reality, the President punted to Congress on everything contentious, such as potential gun bans, which appears to be an unusual acknowledgement by the administration that the President’s independent Constitutional authority in most domestic matters is extremely sparse. And despite all the media-imagined momentum for new gun control measures, it’s unlikely Congress will approve any of Obama’s proposals.
So forget the White House and Congress for a moment; the real battle over guns and the Second Amendment will be in America’s courts.
To some extent, conservatives have been taking their eyes off the ball the past several years. Voters can reject their congressional representatives once every two years, but they’re stuck with bad Federal judges for life.
Consider these shocking facts: in his first four years in office, President Obama appointed two Supreme Court Justices, 30 appellate court judges and 141 district court judges. That means Obama has already appointed a little less than a fifth of all federal judges. If that trend continues through Obama’s second term in office, his appointees would make up about 40 percent of all federal judges by 2016.
Congress can’t toy with broad gun bans (the true goal of the left) if the Judiciary rejects such bans as unconstitutional. Unfortunately, for the next several decades the contours of the Second Amendment, including the very existence of gun rights at all, will be determined in large part by federal judges appointed by President Obama.
The Supreme Court’s 2008 landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which affirmed that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to own a handgun, is upheld by a fragile 5-4 majority on the Court. On the other hand, four judicial liberals on the Court believed that despite being surrounded by all the other individual rights mentioned in the first ten Amendments, the right to keep and bear arms was bizarrely singled out as a “collective-right” intended only for the militia.
So unless conservatives are comfortable having their right to own a gun become dependent on joining the National Guard, Obama’s upcoming judicial confirmation hearings should take priority even to beating back new Federal gun legislation.
