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Obama Served on Anti-Second Amendment Foundation

Protein Wisdom has details from a David Hardy article on how Obama was part of the Joyce Foundation and their attempt to gut the second Amendment:

During Obama’s tenure, the Joyce Foundation board planned and implemented a program targeting the Supreme Court. The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are impartial, and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend.

In 1999, midway through Obama’s tenure, the Joyce board voted [.pdf available at link] to grant the Chicago-Kent Law Review $84,000, a staggering sum by law review standards. The Review promptly published an issue in which all articles attacked the individual right view of the Second Amendment.

The details of how scholarship was "bought" via payoffs for law review articles are appalling. If a drug company bought research like this for their drug study results, it would be a Federal offense; for a lawyer like Obama to tolerate this shows a willingness to bend ethics drastically for 'the cause'. The foundation did more:

The Joyce Foundation board (which still included Obama) responded by expanding its attack on the Second Amendment. Its next move came when Ohio State University announced it was establishing the “Second Amendment Research Center” as a thinktank headed by anti-individual-right historian Saul Cornell. Joyce put up no less than $400,000 to bankroll its creation. The grant was awarded at the board’s December 2002 meeting, Obama’s last function as a Joyce director.

Obama was involved in a wealthy foundation’s attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court, buy legal scholarship, and obliterate the individual right to arms. And now, the products of that foundation are engaging in ads for Obama, as noted by a comment at Protein Wisdom:

The American Hunters and Shooters Association, an astroturf PR effort funded by the Joyce Foundation as a faux alternative to the NRA, has been running saturation radio ads in SW Virginia trying to convince gun owners that Obama is no threat. Of course, they give no specifics on Obama’s views on the Second Amendment and rapidly devolve into a diatribe on economic policy. Yet somehow this is supposed to an independent ad, not coordinated with the Obama campaign.

Reason to Get Excited for McCain

All Republicans for the last two months have been looking for a reason to get excited about Senator John McCain. Like many Republicans, I want to know what my candidate stands for instead of simply voting against another socialist mascarading as a Democrat. Republicans have 2,000 reasons and counting to vote against Obama, but it looks like Republicans have reason number one to support Senator John McCain for President.

The United States Supreme Court today ruled in favor of the Second Amendment in the case of District of Columbia vs. Heller. In a controversial ruling, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of private citizens having the right to keep an bear arms. What this means is that four Supreme Court Justices want to rewrite parts of the US Constitution to fit their principles and desires. The five Justices who support the Constitution are: Chief Justice Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas. The four Justices who support taking away our right to bear arms are: Breyer, Ginsberg, Stevens, and Souter.

Senator John McCain believes in a strict construction philosphy of interpretting the Constitution. In other words, the Supreme Court and Federal Appellate Judges McCain will appoint as President would adhere to ruling on the cases according to the Constitution, not a liberal interpretation based on previous standing and court cases.

In other words, if just one Justice is replaced with a liberal, private gun owners may be forced to give up their guns. Think about how much crime would increase if that were to happen! The only individuals with any kind of weapons would be the criminals and we would all be at their mercy.

Under President McCain, if a Justice retires, the new Justice would be a person who would side with the 5 instead of the 4 on this case. That means a lot to Texans who are proud of their right to bear arms and the freedoms and individuals liberties that our Constitution is designed to protect.

CFIF Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Preserve the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

In its ongoing efforts to protect rights explicitly granted by the United States Constitution, the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) this week filed an Amicus Curiae brief before the United States Supreme Court in the much-anticipated case District of Columbia, et al. v. Heller, commonly referred to as "the D.C. gun ban case." Read more from CFIF media release:

"The Bill of Rights is almost entirely a declaration of individual rights held by 'the people,' and that term is used throughout the Constitution to confer rights upon individual citizens," said Timothy Lee, CFIF's Director of Legal and Public Affairs. "As our brief points out, one cannot assert with a straight face that these Amendments somehow protect collective, governmental rights, as opposed to individual rights. In fact, the Second Amendment unequivocally states that, '... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'" ...

Contrary to popular myth and gun control advocates' common assertions, the United States Supreme Court has never held that the Second Amendment confers only a collective right to keep and bear arms, nor has it somehow rejected an individual right interpretation. Rather, in the 1939 case United States v. Miller, which gun-control advocates commonly cite, the Supreme Court merely held that the defendants had failed to appear before the Court at oral argument or present evidence in their defense. As a consequence, held the Court, it was simply unable to determine whether the defendants' weapons were protected by the Second Amendment. Accordingly, the Supreme Court left unanswered the question of what rights are conferred by the Second Amendment.