Clinton nominates ACLU lawyer and she is approved 96-3.
Not quite equivalent.
It’s pretty clear in my eyes that Bush’s nomination of Miers was derailed by those on the right who see the SCOTUS appointments as needing to be aimed at overturning RvW. An NRA guy (who would, presumably, be all about the right to bear arms) might still be soft on abortion and therefore unacceptable to the same people who found Miers unacceptable.
I think the Democratic moderates aren’t all that hot about gun control. They think it’s a good idea, generally, but it doesn’t steam their waffles the way issues like abortion do. Only the hard core on the issue would fight all that hard. That said, I think gun control is one of those rare issues where the leadership is more up in arms (so to speak) than the followership, so you’d probably see more opposition than is really warranted.
Okay, well, let’s assume that the ACLU lost three votes for every amendment to the Constitution that they don’t support, and let’s generously assume that their stance on the second amendment amounts to not supporting it. Let’s further knock out the eighteenth and twenty-first amendments, since they cancel each other out. That means that they support 24 amendments and don’t support one.
The NRA supports one amendment and doesn’t support 24. We could therefore expect such a candidate to lose the vote, 72-28.
Daniel
That would depend on whether said lawyer was merely aggressively acting on behalf of his client or indeed did not understand the Second Amendment. If indeed he had such difficulty in relating the first and second halves of the Second Amendment, he probably would be even less qualified to sit on the Court than Harriet Meiers.
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Harriet Miers was pushed out because the only thing she could be counted on doing was overturning Roe v Wade. Remeber, she won the backing of the top-tier poliical evangelicals. This wasn’t about politics, for once, but actually about qualifications. With a little bit of backlash towards Bush’s cronyism.
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The second amendment is not a hot issue right now. Frankly, SCOTUS hasn’t said much about it for years, and any battles seem to take place in the legislatures and at the enforcement level. A gun-rights absolutist could pass easily, much more easily than someone with similar opinions on abortion, torture or certain civil liberties. If they actually worked for the NRA, they’d be forced to prove that they weren’t single-issue fanatics, and of course were otherwise qualified, but they could do it.
I’m no fan of Ginsburg’s politics or her judicial philosophy.
But the woman was first in her class at Columbia. I think she was a little more than a generic ACLU lawyer.
Along with the fact that Clinton cleared Ginsburg with Senate Republicans before formally putting her up for nomination.
The idea that Senate Republicans voted for Ginsburg solely out of the goodness of their hearts is as laughably naive as saying George W. Buhs is just a “good ol’ boy” Texas native.
Is that really what you meant to say? Because it reads that in your opinion, the NRA disregards the other amendments than the 2nd.
Just checking.
Anyone know what right-wing blog this dude pulled this misleading statement from?