WSJ.

What an enormous abdication. The Supreme Court ducked its first Second Amendment case in a decade on Monday, and the only plausible explanation is that Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to avoid becoming a target of vengeful Senate Democrats.

In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the Chief joined the four liberals and a (conflicted) Justice Brett Kavanaugh in declaring moot a challenge to New York City’s onerous gun regulation (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York). At issue is a New York City rule that prevents residents with gun licenses from transporting their guns from their city homes to shooting ranges and homes outside the city. Obtaining even a “premises” license requires a $431 fee and police investigation into an applicant’s mental health, criminal history and moral character. It can take six months.

A few points of order.  First, the SCOTUS didn’t have to drop the case.  They can accept anything they want.  Second, New York can go right back to legislating liberty away now, and an aggrieved party must go through the process all over again.  It games the system, and we and they all know it.

Third, the WSJ is assuming that Roberts is a coward.  This may be true, but it also may be true that he fears nothing from Senators and is simply a controller at heart.  Fourth, assuming that he really was afraid of the Senators and is awaiting a less divisive time to rule on the 2A, he’s ignorant.  America is becoming more polarized, not less.

On the mootness point, Justice Alito also pokes his colleagues with this hypothetical: “A State enacts a law providing that any woman wishing to obtain an abortion must submit certification from five doctors that the procedure is medically necessary. After a woman sues, claiming that any requirement of physician certification is unconstitutional, the State replaces its old law with a new one requiring certification by three physicians. Would the court be required to dismiss the woman’s suit?” You know the answer.

Justice Kavanaugh’s role here is curious because, while he joined the majority on mootness, he wrote a concurrence agreeing with the dissent on the Second Amendment merits. This looks to us as if he is trying to protect the Chief Justice from being the fifth vote, and the sole “conservative,” providing a liberal victory while making clear he’s still a solid vote himself for gun rights. The phrase for this is too clever by half.

Justice Kavanaugh may agree with the Chief that the Court needs to avoid political controversies, especially with Democrats threatening to pack the Court if they win the White House and Senate in November. But the Court’s timidity on gun rights amid Senate threats means that liberal and media intimidation will escalate. The Court hasn’t taken a Second Amendment case in a decade, even as cities and states erode its landmark Heller decision bit by bit. The Court is sending a signal that the Second Amendment is the exception in the Bill of Rights, a second-class freedom.

“By incorrectly dismissing this case as moot, the Court permits our docket to be manipulated in a way that should not be countenanced,” Justice Alito warns. He’s right but too polite.

The Chief Justice is carving out a reputation as a highly political Justice whose views on the law can be coerced with threats to the Court’s “independence.” The danger for the Court is that, in bending to these threats, the Chief is compromising the very independence he claims to want to protect.

The time for politeness has ended.  The progs declared war long ago, and what’s left of believers in liberty is drinking tea in the front room playing parlor games and making sure their suits don’t get soiled.

As well all expected.

The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped issuing a major ruling on a New York handgun law, a blow to gun rights advocates and the Trump administration, who had hoped the conservative majority would expand gun rights as early as this term.

Via David Codrea, this awful decision by the supreme court.

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to review the case of Caleigh Wood, a Christian eleventh-grade public high school student in Maryland who, despite threats of receiving a failing grade, refused to deny her faith by making a written profession of the Muslim conversion prayer known as the Shahada—“Thereis no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

[ … ]

The legal question at stake was whether La Plata High School violated the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Speech Clauses when it gave Caleigh Wood an assignment she was unable to complete without violating her religious conscience as a Christian.

She believes it is a sin to profess the existence of any other god but the Christian God. She stood firm in her Christian beliefs and was punished for it. School officials refused her father’s request that she be allowed to opt-out or be given an alternative assignment.  She refused to complete her anti-Christian assignment and consequently received a failing grade.

Thompson added: “Many public schools have become hot beds of Islamic propaganda. Teaching Islam in schools has gone far beyond a basic history lesson. Prompted by zealous Islamic activism and emboldened by confusing court decisions, schools are now bending over backwards to promote Islam while at the same time denigrating Christianity.”

“Although the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to provide clearer constitutional guidance on this important issue, there will be other chances as this issue isn’t going away anytime soon,” he said.

Don’t count on it.  They had the chance this time and declined.  My guess is that it would be Roberts who caused the problem, but one never knows.

If you send your child to a public school, you’re sending them to a communist indoctrination camp.  Or Islamist study center.  Or a place where they will be told that it’s okay not to know whether you’re a boy or a girl.

Is any of that okay with you?

NRO:

Examiner:

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, decrying America’s demonization of guns, is predicting that the parade of new gun control laws, cheered on by President Obama, will hit the Supreme Court soon, possibly settling for ever the types of weapons that can be owned.

Scalia, whose legacy decision in the 2008 case of District of Columbia vs. Heller ended the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., suggested that the Constitution allows limits on what Americans can own, but the only example he offered was a shoulder-launched rocket that would bring down jets.

And the wily judge suggested to an audience of Smithsonian Associates at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium Tuesday night that he is not just preparing for a new gun control challenge, but that he’s softening up one of his liberal colleague on guns.

The long-time duck hunter revealed that he’s taken Obama appointee Elena Kagan hunting several times, the last being for big game in Wyoming where she shot a whitetail doe. “She dropped that doe with one shot,” he said during an event that featured questions from NPR’s court reporter Nina Totenberg.

[ … ]

Scalia explained why he wrote Heller, but wouldn’t discuss current gun control limits in Congress and the states. “There are doubtless cases on the way up,” he said, adding that limits on what weapons can be owned will likely be part of any new decision. “There are doubtless limits, but what they are we will see.”

Commentary

Good.  Let’s rock.  Let’s get on with the preservation or diminution of our rights and freedoms.  Time is wasting.  It’s time to revisit the decisions in Heller and McDonald, not because, as Justice Ginsburg thinks, there might be a reversal of Heller on the horizon with a “future, wiser court,” but because Heller didn’t go far enough.  The Supreme Court recognized our right to ownership of firearms, but didn’t specifically broach the issue of “bearing” those arms, i.e., carrying them for personal defense.

This relationship that appears to be developing between Scalia and Kagan is, I’m sure, very sweet and and all of that, but I wouldn’t count on her vote.  Furthermore, the whole issue of duck hunting concerns me.  The Second Amendment, as Scalia knows, isn’t about duck hunting, or deer hunting, or any other “sporting purpose.”  The sporting purposes test imposed by the last round of onerous firearms laws, and enforced by the ATF, is entirely unconstitutional.  I have said before that I think the test is misapplied, and that if it is a firearm, it has a sporting purpose.  But proliferation of this test through the judiciary (from some future decision) is cowardly because it doesn’t formally recognize the truth, and that is that the second amendment exists in order to ameliorate tyranny.

But for the courts, just remember that we firearms owners aren’t likely to have any more respect for confiscatory policies (or anything that can enable confiscation such as universal background checks), onerous policies (such as counting the number of cartridges I can put in my magazine), or unconstitutional tests (like sporting purposes) coming from the courts than we would if it came from the Congress or the President.  And just for the record, the Supreme Court became a laughingstock over the decision on Obamacare.  You wouldn’t want to put the final nail in the coffin holding your honor or respectability, would you?

Be very careful.  Think wisely.  Don’t start things you cannot stop.

UPDATE: Thank you for the visit on this article.  It is timely and important.