Day-um!

Mark of New Jersey

Mark is a Founding Editor of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, the predecessor of Ordinary Times.

Related Post Roulette

12 Responses

  1. Kyle says:

    I don’t know what I’m more excited for, the McDonald decision or the spate of “activist judges are making us unsafe by making it hard for states and localities to limit explicit rights & privileges” commentary that is surely being written.Report

    • Mark Thompson in reply to Kyle says:

      I’m excited for the case, but to be honest, I’m expecting that the Court will find a way of avoiding the privileges and immunities issue entirely. I hope I’m wrong, of course. Should I be wrong, the resulting commentary will be fascinating, especially under the circumstances – the faultlines of support and opposition will not fall along your usual left-right continuum.Report

      • I’m not convinced that the commentary won’t reflect traditional fault lines and use language (however inappropriate for this issue) that will try to play along those lines. If however they actually do overturn something like a century and a half of precedent, I hope no one who supports the ruling will ever ever ever say anything about “activist judges”. Or that if they do in some other case, that they lose their right to comment on constitutional law issues forever and ever.

        Given the Court’s relative reluctance to take a very high case load (I mean the number of cert petitions they grant is becoming almost laughably small) I’m not sure if overturning Slaughter-House is actually something they’d contemplate.Report

        • As expected, it looks like they’re not going to reach the issue. Anyhow, the way that the case was breaking down, the more movement-oriented conservatives (the ones most likely to trot out the tired ‘activism’ charge) seemed to be firmly opposed to the P&I argument, while the more fringe-y elements of the Right were highly supportive thereof. As far as I could tell, a similar dynamic was at play on the Left, with the mainstream liberals largely fretting about gun control, and the civil libertarians chomping at the bit at the opportunity to overturn Slaughterhouse.Report

          • I meant more that the substance of P&I would get lost in teh “GUNZ vs. GUBBERMENT!!!!” debate that would come out first, but I have to admit I’m disappointed that they’re avoiding ruling on the precedent of Slaughterhouse which was an absolute travesty to begin with and should’ve been overturned long long ago.Report

  2. Michael Drew says:

    Is this a fair summary of the background for the uninitiated?:

    http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/03/dont-trash-constitution-justice-scalia.htmlReport

  3. Kyle says:

    Parts, yes. The main problem is that it really doesn’t get into either the McDonald case nor place the current 14th amendment issues in any kind of reliable context.

    It bashes Scalia and careens from normative judgement to casting aspersions and back again, which tells you very little about the legal issues, just personal ones.

    I also – though Mark might look at this differently – don’t really put that much stock into the judges’ questions. They can be revealing but unlike C-span pontificating, they’re more of an academic exercise in poking and prodding legal arguments.

    Not to mention Kendall disinterestedly refers to both an article he’s quoted in and an organization he’s quoted on behalf of without disclosing such information.

    Finally, it omits a key piece of Justice Scalia’s position to make him seem like a hack, the Justice is “willing to accept the proposition that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, despite its textual limitation to procedure, incorporates certain substantive guarantees specified in the Bill of Rights.”

    Which is distinguished from rights granted via due process not specifically in the Bill of Rights which is a key difference that Kendall glides right over as if it doesn’t exist.Report