This is the quote from Joe Biden on confirming Supreme Court Justices during a campaign season (taken from The New York Post):
“Once the political season is underway,” Biden said, “action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. That is what is fair to the nominee . . . Otherwise . . . we will be in deep trouble as an institution,” stuck in “a bitter fight, no matter how good a person is nominated by the president.”
Yesterday Heritage Action released the following statement from chief executive officer Michael A. Needham:
“Nothing has changed. Senate Republicans deserve credit for using their ‘Advice and Consent’ authority to ensure the American people’s voices are not ignored as they are in the process of selecting their next president. The next president — Republican or Democrat — should be in the position to fill the Court’s vacancy with the advise and consent of the Senate.
“President Obama and Senate Democrats will no doubt call Judge Garland a ‘mainstream Federal judge’ and promise his ‘approach to deciding cases on the law and the Constitution, not politics or an ideological agenda.’ Of course, they said those exact words when liberal Justices Sotomayor and Kagan were nominated. We are one liberal Justice away from seeing gun rights restricted and partial birth abortion being considered a constitutional right. The Republican majority exists to block these type of nominees.”
Yesterday Townhall.com reported the following:
Back in 2007, Judge Garland voted to undo a D.C. Circuit court decision striking down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The liberal District of Columbia government had passed a ban on individual handgun possession, which even prohibited guns kept in one’s own house for self-defense. A three-judge panel struck down the ban, but Judge Garland wanted to reconsider that ruling. He voted with Judge David Tatel, one of the most liberal judges on that court. As Dave Kopel observed at the time, the “[t]he Tatel and Garland votes were no surprise, since they had earlier signaled their strong hostility to gun owner rights” in a previous case. Had Garland and Tatel won that vote, there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court wouldn’t have had a chance to protect the individual right to bear arms for several more years.
Moreover, in the case mentioned earlier, Garland voted with Tatel to uphold an illegal Clinton-era regulation that created an improvised gun registration requirement. Congress prohibited federal gun registration mandates back in 1968, but as Kopel explained, the Clinton Administration had been “retaining for six months the records of lawful gun buyers from the National Instant Check System.” By storing these records, the federal government was creating an informal gun registry that violated the 1968 law. Worse still, the Clinton program even violated the 1994 law that had created the NICS system in the first place. Congress directly forbade the government from retaining background check records for law-abiding citizens.
This is something to think about. I am not a gun person. I didn’t grow up in a hunting family, and until I moved to North Carolina I had never been around guns. That has changed since I have been here, and I will be taking a gun safety course in the near future. I believe it is necessary to have a population that has the freedom to bear arms. I believe that is the intent of the Second Amendment. I am also convinced that the Second Amendment will protect us from government takeovers from both internal and external sources. It is important to the preservation of our freedom and it protects the other Amendments.
I realize that if Hillary Clinton becomes President, a more liberal judge will be nominated, and we will probably lose our Second Amendment privileges. However, I still believe the nomination process should be put on hold until after the election.