Samuel Alito for US Supreme Court -- Yes or No

[packsaddle]

Prairie, I'm with you, man.

[Zahnada]

Torveaux

 

There are problems with comparing a handgun ban to other historical instances. During Prohibition, bootlegging became a profitable business because the demand for alcohol cut across all socio-economic levels. The poor, the rich, and the middle class were all willing to pay for it. With such high demand, the infamous bootleggers had incentive to provide a very high supply. This, in turn, kept prices profitable, but still reasonable for the average citizen. I don't see this kind of demand for handguns ever amounting to truckloads of handguns sweeping down the Canadian border. Guns are already expensive, but a ban on guns would make the blackmarket ones prohibitively expensive for the lower classes (and most violent crime stems from lower socio-economic status).

 

The comparision between making handguns illegal and illegal drug trafficing is also flawed. Drugs are an addiction that people feel they must feed. A handgun, although possibly a mental addiction to the feeling of security, has not physical addicting ability. I just don't see your doom and gloom scenerio of blackmarket handguns making the situation any worse than it currently is. According to my proposition, all the current civilians who own handguns would be allowed to keep them. Once used illegally, or found in possession of someone with a criminal record, that gun would leave the system. The remaining handguns would still be in possession of the lawabiding public.

 

And then I had a question about your statement about how regular, law abiding citizens would be attracted to lawlessness because of such a ban. Would you buy a blackmarket handgun if they were otherwise illegal? I really don't see vast amounts of people turning to criminals just to get a handgun, but maybe I just associate with a different kind of crowd.

[Kahuna]

I think the MAD analogy is a good one. Remember that MAD has prevented nuclear war. The reason that MAD became policy was that, once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. The same thing is true of personal weapons. If I thought there was any realistic chance of getting guns out of the hands of bad guys, I would be willing to give up my handgun. I have lived too long and seen efforts in too many places fail to have any realistic expectation of that.

 

Another factor is that people today are subject to a lot of dangers that, years ago, we didn't face. Road rage, gangs, racially inspired violence (well, okay, the minorties faced that kind of thing) and just random violence. I'm not a big guy and I'm too old to learn karate. However, the thought that I have or may have a weapon may be a deterrent to an attack. I can think of a couple of people I know who have been in those situations. Displaying a handgun will make most people leave you alone.

 

I wish it wasn't so. But it is.

[Prairie_Scouter]

Aloha Kahuna,

 

Yes, and MAD is gradually being dismantled because of the recognized danger of more people wanting to join the club, and with more members, the more likely it is that some accident will occur, or some planned event caused by the relative ease of procurement. I think the same is true of guns. Yes, there is road rage, etc., but the answer isn't to make it easy for people to shoot at each other while they're winging down the highway (as beautiful as the roadways are in some areas of your lovely State ). We need to gradually cut back on the perceived need to answer violence with violence.

 

Yes, it's reality now; the world is a dangerous place, but not as dangerous as the news media would have you think. We all know somebody who's been involved in some sort of violent act, I'd bet, but as much as we might like to, the answer isn't to all go our and arm ourselves.

[Kahuna]

Prairie: I would argue that MAD is not being dismantled, although there has been some disarmament between the superpowers. You are correct that MAD is less effective today because of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of who knows who. However, the superpowers are only reducing the numbers of weapons they have. The analogy I see is that if I feel I'm not threatened by armed gangs at my home I don't need all these 50 caliber machine guns and bazookas I have in my golf bags anymore . I can probably get by with a couple of Berettas and a shotgun.

 

I certainly agree with you that we should not all go out and arm ourselves. There are lots of folks I know that I don't want anywhere near a firearm. In fact, I would be very happy if I was the only one who had one.

 

I also concur that we are made to believe the world is more dangerous than it really is by virtue of the way the media reports things. But that doesn't mean I won't ever need to use my handgun. Besides, I find it very relaxing to shoot at Usama Bin Laden targets at the range. (No Scouts involved.)

 

[Prairie_Scouter]

Aloha Kahuna,

 

I think I'd agree pretty much with your assessment of MAD. Not completely dismantled, but made less dangerous. Now we can only blow up the whole world 3 or 4 times over. Of course, now you've got the problem with the old USSR having all these nukes around with very few people who really know how to safely control them. Kind of like the gun situation in the U.S.

 

If you machined the stock of your shotgun a bit, I'd bet it'd make a nifty 2 wood

 

Oh, yeah, and what about Samuel Alito? I think we were talking about that 50 or 60 posts ago . I dunno. The guys gives off a lot of mixed signals. Maybe that's a good thing. I just want an intelligent jurist who isn't tied to either side of any argument, and can keep his personal feelings out of his decisions. From the joy expressed by conservatives, I suspect that he may not be that guy, but people on the Court have surprised people in the past.

[Kahuna]

Aloha, Prairie,

 

Actually, I have a good 2 wood, but I'm missing a 2 iron. Maybe if I work on the 50 caliber . . .

 

Ah yes, Judge Alito. He was the topic of this thread before it started on a rabbit trail, wasn't he? I don't know if he gives mixed signals or not. Obviously, he believed that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but so do other jurists who you probably would not guess: Ruth Bader Ginzberg, Alan Dershowitz and me. I am decidedly pro-choice and I'm glad the law has been stable on that point for so many years, but I can't find any right to privacy in the Constitution. So, if I was on the Court, what would I do? I don't know. I guess it would depend upon the case in which the issue arises. I would be very reluctant to overturn it, because we would waste a lot of time in state legislatures trying to pass anti-abortion laws. Alito probably would see it the same way, although I suppose he is pro-life.

 

At any rate, he strikes me as a jurist who can read the Constitution and figure out what it means rather than depending on his "feelings" about the issue as some have done on the Court. The way the Democrats and Republicans have been behaving lately (a pox on all their houses), it's sure to be a big food fight in the Senate when they take up the issue. Can't we just elect adults to office?

[Prairie_Scouter]

Aloha, Kahuna,

And Hau`oli L Ho`omaika`i! (ok, I looked it up Happy Thanksgiving, anyway...)

 

Yeah, I'm pretty embarassed by both parties. Kind of reminds me of the House of Commons in Great Britain. Half of the fighting isn't even about issues; it's just attempts to make the other party look bad. About the only thing some of them are starting to have in common is a dislike for the conduct of the war in Iraq.

 

I suspect a pretty ugly battle over Alito. One really interesting part will be if the Republicans try to squelch discussion of Alito's personal views after they tried to get the same kind of information from Miers. I don't know if Alito is controversial enough for the Democrats to try and filibuster, but it's a possibility. I doubt that they'd be able to get the compromise group together like they did last time when Bush injected a candidate (can't remember the name right now) knowing that it would force the issue. More game playing. I dunno, but it seems to me that whole thing was a lot more civil when the ABA was more or less leading the judgement of capabilities on these candidates, but I could be remembering it through rose colored glasses.

[Kahuna]

Mahalo (thank you), Prairie Scouter!

 

I would have had to look it up too and my Hawaiian-English dictionary is upstairs.

 

You are correct that confirmation was a much more civil process in prior years. I don't know if ABA blessing had anything to do with it, but the parties were much less contentious. Of course, there was the Judge Bork debacle, which I still feel came out wrong. He is a right-of-mainstream conservative, but a brilliant jurist and certainly able to keep his personal opinions out of his decisions. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, on the other hand, is a left-of-mainstream liberal who was confirmed without much fuss by a Republican controlled Senate.

 

I'm just tired of all the bickering and wish they would (all) try to act in the best interest of the country and not for the sake of party gotcha's.

[LongHaul]

What gives me pause is that all the candidates are jurists! A very good friend of mine is a lawyer, when you ask him what some passage says he will often joke "What do you want it to say?" He says that his job is to make the law say what ever the client wants it to say. As we have seen in the discussion on the 2nd amendment, the Supreme Court has failed to interperate the law as written and then apply that finding. The court has gone into the diliberation with a decision already made and sought justification through their interpretation of the Constitution. What we need are honest candidates, I don't remember what those look like though.

LongHaul(This message has been edited by LongHaul)

[Kahuna]

Your lawyer friend is more or less correct. The job of a lawyer is to be an advocate for the client. Within the bounds of professional ethics, it's perfectly proper to attempt to persuade a court that a certain statute means a certain thing. The job of the judge is to listen to both sides of the argument, read the law and then interpret it according to his legal training.

[Hunt]

To follow up on Kahuna's point, I'd like to mention that laws vary widely in how specific they are, and thus, in how much interpretation they need. Just looking at the Constitution, there is little or no ambiguity about how old a person has to be in order to be President. On the other hand, a phrase like "freedom of speech" is not very specific. The courts have to figure out what that term means in the context of a particular case. Even if everyone agrees that the proper way to interpret such words is by figuring out the "original intent" of the drafters, it's not so easy to figure out how those 18th-century people would have thought about current issues. Which of their principles would they consider most important?

For a look at a "conservative" court applying an "original intent" analysis, check out the Dred Scott decision: http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/21.htm. Then read this article, in which George W. Bush and other conservatives criticize the Dred Scott case as an example of judicial activism: http://www.slate.com/id/2108083/. In other words, a "judicial activist" is a judge who interprets laws in ways you don't like.

[SemperParatus]

Listening to Teddy Kennedy's opening comments yesterday made me want to barf.

[Kahuna]

Listening to Teddy always has that effect on me. Of course, all those guys really love to listen to themselves talk. Teddy took his entire time just to beat up on George Bush and his fear that Alito (who he once called "Alioto") might ever take his side on some issue.

 

Joe Biden is another one that's fun to listen to. He spends most of his questioning time, making speeches. Works to Alito's advantage, since he doesn't have to answer as many questions from Joe.

 

 

[Trevorum]

I missed Teddy yesterday, but I was lucky enough to hear about 45 minutes of Alito this morning. He sounds like a thoughtful jurist. I predict he'll be confirmed and will eventually turn out to be a surprise to the far right.