We have posted several videos from this summer’s Second Amendment Task Force this week. Today’s final installment is of remarks by Dave Kopel, Research Director at the Independence Institute. During his address, Kopel discussed the Kagan nomination in the broader context of the fight to protect gun rights. He specifically discussed the development of the Fourteenth Amendment and the role it can play in the defense of the Second Amendment.
This Tuesday voters in Missouri, by a 40-point margin, approved a ballot measure rejecting the individual mandate at the core of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Asked what the vote meant to the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “Nothing.” Yesterday in San Francisco, federal judge Vaughn Walker gave the exact same weight to a California ballot measure that affirmed marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Specifically Judge Walker overturned the California Marriage Protection Act after concluding, as a matter of fact, that the …
Yesterday, we shared a video of our own Hans von Spakovsky speaking at a Second Amendment Task Force event earlier this summer. Hans focused on Kagan’s record and how her inaction on certain Second Amendment-related issues speaks volumes about how she would deal with them on the bench. In today’s video, Stephen P. Halbrook, a 30 year veteran of litigation on 2nd Amendment rights, explains some cases that he worked on relating to the Second Amendment while Kagan was the point person on gun control during the administration of President …
The Senate today commenced debate on the nomination of Elena Kagan to serve a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) opened the proceedings with a strong statement of how conservatives should assess nominees to the High Court. Senator Sessions started with a discussion of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and Elena Kagan’s efforts to bar the military from recruiting on campus in her role as Dean of the Harvard Law School.
At a Second Amendment Task Force held earlier this summer, Hans Von Spakovsky, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, explained that Elena Kagan’s lack of action in her current job as Solicitor General with regard to the 2nd Amendment speaks volumes about how Kagan would rule on similar cases that would appear before the Supreme Court. As Hans explained to the audience, “”A lot of the discussion and speculation about Kagan’s legal philosophy is limited by her very thin record of scholarship and her complete lack of experience in …
The Senate today commenced debate on the nomination of Elena Kagan to serve a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Supreme Court. The debate opened with Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee setting the tone for liberals in the Senate. The debate expected to last until the end of the week. Senator Leahy led off with the following statement: More than 12 weeks ago, President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. …
Even as Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) was telling constituents that the federal government has unlimited power to do whatever it wants, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson was saying, “Not so fast!” What President Obama considers his crowning achievement illustrates the great divide in American politics — between those who see Washington’s power as limited only by the ability to sway voters and we who see it as limited by design in the U.S. Constitution. Straining to find a constitutional basis for mandating that everyone must buy health insurance, Obama’s lawyers …
Last month at a town hall in Hayward, Calif., a constituent asked Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) about Obamacare: “If this legislation is Constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives? … If they can do this, what can’t they?” Stark, a long-time advocate of government-run health care, gave an honest yet troubling answer: “The federal government can, yes, do most anything in this country.” Yesterday a federal court in Virginia agreed with the logic, but not the Constitutional understanding, …
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) is one of the more honest members of the left in Congress. Long before President Barack Obama first started pushing Obamacare, Rep. Stark was advocating for a government “Medicare for All” takeover over our nation’s health care system. Rep. Stark’s honest view about the proper role and power of the federal government were on display again last month at a townhall in Hayward, CA. In the video posted, a constituent asks Stark: “If this legislation is Constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal governments ability …
In a major blow to an Obama administration seeking to show that the lawsuits challenging Obamacare are “frivolous” by scoring an early dismissal—something it hoped to do before the November elections—a district court ruled to the contrary this morning. Federal District Judge Henry Hudson rejected the motion by the United States to dismiss Virginia’s lawsuit and allowed it to proceed. This is the first decision involving a major case challenging the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate, and so its impact may reverberate beyond this individual case. The United States …
