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Gary Edwards

Does 2nd Amendment Confer an Individual Right to Bear Arms? - Tea Party Command Center - 0 views

  • 1. Barron v Baltimore (1833): held that the Bill of Rights applies directly to the federal government—not to state governments. In effect, the court ruled that states could infringe on the Bill of Rights since the Bill of Rights restrained only the federal government. (Don’t ask. I didn’t delve deeply into the reasoning behind this decision.)
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Nonsense!  The No Religious Test Clause of the United States Constitution is found in Article VI, paragraph 3, and states that: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Furthermore, all federal, state, and local officials must take an oath to support the Constitution. This means that state governments and officials cannot take actions or pass laws that interfere with the Constitution, laws passed by Congress, or treaties.
  • 2. Nunn v State of Georgia (1846): held that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and that “the right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed or broken in upon in the smallest degree.”
  • 11. District of Columbia v Heller (2008): the court ruled that the Cruikshank decision failed to properly weigh 14th Amendment protections and that “the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
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  • McDonald v City of Chicago ensured that the full force of the 2nd Amendment extended to all localities as well.
  • But, what’s behind the McDonald challenge? In short, the Illinois state constitution states that “Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
  • no discussion of the 2nd Amendment can be properly wrapped up without this incisive quote from Thomas Jefferson: “False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary of trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evil, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such nature…Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man…”
Gary Edwards

Rivkin and Casey: The Constitution and the Debt Ceiling - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    The Constitution gives Congress power over the national purse, permitting it to tax, to spend and "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." From the time of the founding until the passage of the First Liberty Bond Act in 1917, Congress itself voted on each and every new government bond issue, specifying the amount to be borrowed and the terms involved. Today, exercise of this power has been delegated to the Treasury Department, which generally can borrow up to the debt limit. Yet this practice can easily be changed. It wouldn't even be necessary to repeal the existing "debt ceiling" statutory framework, an action that President Obama might well veto. Congress can simply refuse to use it. In other words, Congress cannot renege on debt already incurred, but it can condition, decrease and even stop issuance of new U.S. debt. This strategy would put Congress's fiscal conservatives very much back in the driver's seat. The need for new government borrowing is constant; currently nearly 40 cents of every dollar the government spends is borrowed. Anytime Congress and the president cannot agree on how new borrowing should be accomplished (and for what purposes), and what additional spending cuts should be implemented to avoid increasing the nation's overall debt burden, spending will simply be cut across the board by 40%. That is one very big incentive for agreement. Of course, were Congress to reclaim this authority and separately approve each new U.S. debt issue, it would once again be directly responsible for government borrowing in a way that it has avoided for nearly 100 years. With political power comes political accountability.
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