The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

'Supreme Court Is Wrong On The Second Amendment'

Quite so.

The Incorporation Doctrine is false and the 2nd Amendment does not limit state power to control or even ban weapons in general or firearms in particular.

But that is not what Hillary means.

She is asserting the much debunked liberal dogma that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the states the right to maintain militias or, in today's context, the National Guard, and does not guarantee an individual right to "keep and bear arms," at all.

This about O's position and remarks is interesting.

P.S.

About incorporation, libertarians and some conservatives currently agree with some liberals in holding that the privileges or immunities clause in fact makes the 14th Amendment do what people used to say the due process clause made it do, make constitutional rights previously only good against the general government equally good against the states.

But the thing is a near-mindless repetition of the privileges and immunities clause of the Articles of Confederation and Article IV of the US Constitution.

To accomplish so revolutionary a change as the Incorporation Doctrine contemplates, language clearly intending just that would have been used and the thing would have been sharply and clearly controverted and discussed during drafting and ratification.

What did happen was considerable muddle and confusion between (a) the rights of persons and the rights of citizens, (b) preventing states from denying rights to the freedmen previously afforded by them to free whites, (c) preventing states from denying rights to freedmen or others that already existed according to the pre-Civil War constitution and (d) extending constitutional guarantees against certain sorts of behavior by the federal government by prohibiting those same sorts of behavior to the states (incorporation).

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