I\u2019m fortunate enough to be in Florida at the moment, on a day when weather.com says my old home town is at about 27 degrees below zero wind chill factor.\u00a0 More chilling than that, however, was the unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.<\/p>\n
He was the Second Amendment\u2019s strongest defender on the Supreme Court of the United States, though the quieter Justice Clarence Thomas comes close.\u00a0 Across the gun forums this sad news is being greeted with the collective wail, \u201cWe are screwed!\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m not prepared to go so far as to say that yet, but we\u2019ve certainly suffered a very profound blow.\u00a0 A gun-wise veteran lawyer I know in Kentucky succinctly puts it this way: \u201cWe just lost the most powerful and important conservative in America and Barack Obama gets to decide who replaces him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our side prevailed by five-to-four in the landmark Heller <\/em>and McDonald <\/em>decisions, with Scalia writing the majority opinion in the former and concurring in the latter. Obviously, the balance now tips.\u00a0 We had all known that the single biggest reason we needed to elect a President this year who respects the Constitution is that there will be multiple new Justices appointed to SCOTUS in the next few years.\u00a0 Scalia\u2019s passing makes the bad dream of the tipped scales come prematurely. President Obama has already stated that he will soon nominate a replacement, and no one reading this needs me to tell them where an Obama appointee is going to come down on this issue. Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said yesterday that the nation should wait to appoint Scalia\u2019s replacement until after the election; \u2018tis devoutly to be wished, but I\u2019m not sure he can pull that off.\u00a0 Here, thanks to regular commentator Don-PA, are reassuring words from an observer whose opinion is more sanguine than mine<\/a>.<\/p>\n The body wasn\u2019t cold before we started hearing conspiracy theories. (It did <\/em>seem that \u201cdeath from natural causes\u201d was announced earlier than I\u2019d have expected; maybe Clarence Thomas should be looking over his shoulder?)<\/p>\n I bid adieu to Justice Scalia, a strong friend of all who believe in the right to keep and bear arms, a right he most articulately reinforced in Heller.<\/em><\/p>\n Opinions welcome here in the comments section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m fortunate enough to be in Florida at the moment, on a day when weather.com says my old home town is at about 27 degrees below zero wind chill factor.\u00a0 More chilling than that, however, was the unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He was the Second Amendment\u2019s strongest defender on the Supreme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3598","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}