What Does The Firearms Policy Coalition Have To Do With The Texas Abortion Law?
BY Herschel Smith
3 years ago
Kavanaugh pressed Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone on the prospect that the legal machinery of the new abortion law could be used against other freedoms, referring to a brief filed by a gun rights group.
“We can assume that this will be across the board, equally applicable as the Firearms Policy Coalition says, to all constitutional rights?” Kavanaugh said, later asking Texas’ lawyer to imagine a law that let anyone sue a person for using an AR-15 rifle and hold them liable for $1 million.
Did they say something like that? Oh to be sure, they did.
The importance of this petition is not about any debate over the existence or scope of any constitutional right to abortion. Indeed, Amicus takes no position on such questions, which are before this Court in other cases. Rather, this case is about access to the means of enforcing individual constitutional rights, as determined by this Court’s cases, and protecting against their infringement, regardless of the particular right involved. Texas’s novel scheme for infringing upon and chilling the exercise of the right to abortion under this Court’s Roe and Casey decisions while seeking to evade judicial review, if allowed to stand, could and would just as easily be applied to other constitutional rights. That result is wholly anathema to our constitutional scheme, regardless what one thinks of abortion or, indeed, of any other hotly debated constitutional right, such as the right to keep and bear arms.
See also here.
But you see, there is no constitutional right to destroy a company because someone used their product to injure others, any more than there’s a constitutional right to kill babies. Those things are just made up out of whole cloth.
FPC is scared that 2A rights will be violated if we disallow the killing of babies. But if you make your bed with the devil, don’t be surprised when he kills you. There is no basis for the belief that this argument won’t be used to kill the Texas law and then summarily ignored when a state or individual bankrupts a firearms company (with the black robed tyrants ignoring the case).
Justice has been sacrificed for expediency, because in the eyes of the FPC, the only thing standing in the way of the obliteration of the 2A is SCOTUS interpretation. Then where are you?
To me, the same place we were. God grants a right, man does not. Breakage of the covenant of the 2A means that the government is illegitimate and must be divorced, not that we lose a right.
The FPC could have done a much better job with their brief. They’re on the losing side of one issue, and they may end up on the losing side of yet another.
Fear is a vicious monster and should not be tolerated.
On November 2, 2021 at 11:25 am, Frank Clarke said:
Amendment IX — The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
If you’re going to attack abortion as ‘not a right’, you have to get past the 9th amendment which, translated, says “just because we didn’t name some particular right doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it just means that we didn’t want to waste all that ink and parchment on something any hayseed could figure out for themselves”.
The key aspect of ‘right’ is that every right — that everyone agrees is a right — has one common element: “leave me alone unless I’m violating someone else’s right”. That’s where abortion fails the acid test. It violates the fetus’ right to life.
“Aha,” the reply comes, “but a fetus isn’t a ‘someone’ who has rights that can be violated! Gotcha!”
In Texas they say: “It has a heartbeat. We err on the side of caution by assuming it IS ‘someone’, and experience shows that, given sufficient time, we’re almost always right about that.”
Can you get a Constitutional amendment passed that declares ‘life’ to begin at conception? To begin at the first heartbeat? To begin at …? If you can, your problem is (somewhat) solved. If you can’t, the whole thing turns into — no, continues to be — one giant pissing contest. That’s hard to hear, but that’s the truth.
On November 2, 2021 at 11:30 am, Herschel Smith said:
Oh bull. You’re missing the point. Murder is declared a crime by states. By states. The constitution doesn’t say anything about the right to murder, which is what Roe v. Wade did.
The decision was and remains illegitimate.
The FedGov had no standing to declare that states cannot continue to declare murder to be murder. Many (maybe most) states would to this day have laws against abortion without the intervention by FedGov (which should have been opposed by force of arms).
EDIT: To help with this, replace abortion with larceny or breaking and entering. There are no federal laws against that, and neither does there have to be. If the SCOTUS declared a constitutional right to breaking and entering, that declaration is no more legitimate than their declaration that murder isn’t murder.
But … you might say, a state that enacts laws against abortion involves making value judgments and using a system of morality. Yes, it does. Just like the libertarian view of doing no harm does as well. It is impossible to enact laws unless one assumes a system of morality and makes value judgments, it’s just that in the libertarian world, it’s all left incomplete because they have no answer for when life begins. Laws have been in existence since the beginning of America that made such value judgments. The FedGov no more has the right to read into the constitution that there is a right to murder than it has to declare larceny legal, and it shouldn’t have to do either one since neither larceny nor abortion is discussed as a right in the constitution. Those laws are state laws
On November 2, 2021 at 12:12 pm, ExpatNJ said:
Captain said:
“Justice has been sacrificed for expediency … FPC could have done a much better job with their brief. They’re on the losing side of one issue, and they may end up on the losing side of yet another.”
Is it just me, or, does the FPC position on the TX law sound remarkably like what another, well-known, yet dying (defunct?), 2A-Rights organization might have argued on this matter.?
On November 2, 2021 at 8:47 pm, Frank Clarke said:
The fedgov HAS made murder and larceny legal — when they do it: that’s what happens when they send a Predator drone to a wedding, or when the feds help state police grab some juicy civil asset forfeiture. If we’re going to be consistent, we should protest that, too.
As I said, abortion fails the test of “leave me alone”. Don’t shoot your allies.
On November 2, 2021 at 9:08 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@Frank,
I have protested predator drones and the entire HVT program.
I emphasize what I said above. The constitution doesn’t speak to abortion, any more than it speaks to larceny or breaking and entering. That wasn’t its point. It was a covenant between states and the FedGov, with a list of things the FedGov cannot and shall not do to citizens.
The states control what’s criminal and what’s not.