Little-Acorn
Gold Member
They are quite correct, and the courts you cite are demonstrably wrong in most such cases.
The courts have upheld them in spite of the Constitution, which does not. The latter clearly states that the Fed govt has only the powers specifically listed in it, and all others are reserved to the states and the people. None of the programs I mentioned are so listed.
As you point out, the Courts (notably the Supreme Court) upheld them "for good". That is, to try to make society better. In doing so, they forgot that their job is not to "make society better", even if nine unelected men had any way of knowing better then the society itself, what was "better" and how to accomplish it. Their long-forgotten job is to uphold and enforce the Constitution and the laws of the U.S. And in that order.
They did their jobs pretty well until the 1930s. TIll then, they kept pointing out what I pointed out: that the Fed was forbidden to do many things, including most of then-President FDR's new leftist programs. FDR began attacking and vilifying them personally, blaming them for the horrors of the Great Depression. They finally cracked and invented a new definition of "liberty" that would accommodate pretty much anything government wanted to do. They announced that the "liberty" government WAS supposed to safeguard, now included "freedom" from the ordinary problems and perils of life. This let the Fed start regulating anything that could cause problems... which includes most everything, of course. It was a 5-4 decision, and the dissenting justices screamed their heads off at the incredible travesty of the Court's function. But they were in the minority, and so the unconstitutional view prevailed. And most of the "upholding" you referred to, happened on and after that date. The case was West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, I believe in 1937.
US v. Miller (1939) was one of those latter-day travesties... but not because of any new definition of "liberty". Miller was a bootlegger and bank robber, whom the Feds tried to bust for illegal liquor. But they couldn't find his still, so they picked a shotgun out of his truck and showed it was shorter than the recently-passed National Firearms Act (1934) said it should be. The case went to a Federal district court, with Miller represented by a pro-bono lawyer who worked for a pittance. The judge found the NFA flatly unconstitutional, violating the 2nd amendment, and threw out the case.
The Feds appealed it to the Supremes, where cases were required to have huge amounts of preparation and paperwork. By then, the lawyer couldn't find his client, an admitted sleaze who didn't have many friends after turning State's Evidence against his fellow bank robbers in an earlier case. Rather than go through the grinding weeks of preparation for a case where he would have no client and probably wouldn't get paid at all, the lawyer quit. When the case came on the docket, the Feds showed up for the Prosecution with their usual battery of lawyers, papers, etc.... and nobody showed up for the Defense at all. No Miller, no lawyers, nobody. (Two weeks later, Miller was found dead in a stream bed in Arkansas with four pistol bullets in his chest).
The Feds took advantage of this windfall, and recited a number of flat lies to the Justices. They insisted the 2nd amendment protected only the rights of state militias to own guns, not individual people, despite the clear wording of the 2nd to the contrary. They announced that the 2nd only protected weapons similar to those in use by the military, again with no concurrence from its actual text. To top it off, they even claimed that Miller's shotgun was NOT similar to military weapons of the time... despite the fact that short-barrelled shotguns had been used widely by the armed forces on both sides of the most recent major war, WWI, where they were referred to as "trench guns".
And nobody stood up for the defense, to refute their lies.
The resulting opinion in US v. Miller, is a linguistic curiosity worthy of a Bill Clinton. The justices basically rubber-stamped the Feds' lies, saying things like "Since it is not within judicial notice" that the shotgun was a military-style weapon, and that the 2nd said anything other than what the Feds claimed it said, therefore they held that the 2nd covers only military-style weapons, Miller's shotgun wasn't military-style, and the NFA wasn't as unconstitutional as every previous judge said it was (a fact not brought up in the hearings). Entirely because nobody had told them otherwise during those hearings.
Since then, virtually every so-called gun-control law, has cited US v. Miller as its justification. The anti-gun-rights people have been milking that travesty of a case for everything they could get. And the preponderance of modern-liberal judges and justices on our courts ever since, who thought they should "make society better" rather than uphold the actual law, have carefully avoided ANY other direct 2nd-amendment case coming to the Supreme Court ever since... because they know that a straightforward reading of the Constitution will knock down the entire house of cards they have built upon that one misguided decision.
It's one of the many reasons the Left has fought so hard against law-abiding ("originalist") judges being appointed and confirmed. A battle they have been losing for the last few decades.
Yes, the courts have upheld so-called "gun control" laws. That bears little relation to what the Supreme Law of the Land actually says - a trend that is slowly but surely on the way OUT.
