The King And I

So I see that the United States Supreme Court has narrowly decided to allow us to keep the Second Amendment for at least a little while longer, with King Anthony once again the swing vote in a 5-4 decision.

While I'm glad the Court got this one right, it should be noted that they have absolutely no authority anyway to strike down one of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and so regardless of what they might have decided, the right would still exist. The notion that we would be having to wait, 219 years after the ratification of the Constitution, for a court to tell us whether the Second Amendment will remain operative is absurd, and it's reminiscent of the kind of monarchy from which the nation's founders were trying to extricate themselves.

Because we are a nation of laws rather than men, and because the supreme law of the land is the Constitution, citizens would be not only have been right, but even obligated to disobey the Court's ruling had it gone the other direction. Ironically, the very purpose of the amendment was to prevent a tyrant from waving away our rights on a whim, which the Court was one swishy (as usually) Anthony Kennedy vote away from trying to do.

Because the Court has chosen to insert itself in all the major political battles of the day and rule by fiat (with the help of the liberal advocacy groups that decided the democratic process wasn't going their way in the 20th century), one unelected man--Anthony Kennedy--is now the most powerful person in the land. Whichever way the wind happens to blow the famously vascillating Justice Kennedy is the way our constitutional rights go that day. Today the wind was blowing in a good direction. Tomorrow it may not be. Such a setup, of course, makes an utter mockery of the Constitution, a situation that's not changed when Kennedy follows the broken clock rule and happens to get a decision right.

Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy Second Amendment