How did Soto vote? I really want to know
With Breyer, who swears that
Heller didn't happen. I'm very disappointed with her.
Slaughterhouse still stands, and if anything, has been given a few more years of life by this case. I'm ecstatic that the 2nd Amendment has been incorporated, but like Justice Thomas, I'm a little disappointed in the mechanism used:
The notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only “process” before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words. Moreover, this fiction is a particularly dangerous one. The one theme that links the Court’s substantive due process precedents together is their lack of a guiding principle to distinguish “fundamental” rights that warrant protection from nonfundamental rights that do not. (Thomas concurrence, p. 7)
Alito did a great job with what he had, and I enjoyed seeing him rip into Chicago's arguments:
Municipal respondents’ remaining arguments are at war with our central holding in Heller: that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home. Municipal respondents, in effect, ask us to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.
Municipal respondents’ main argument is nothing less than a plea to disregard 50 years of incorporation precedent and return (presumably for this case only) to a by gone era. (p. 33)
I'd hoped for a revolution, but we got an incremental improvement. I'm okay with that, just not ecstatic.
In other news, the Brady Campaign is freaking out. I actually got a very strident email from them
before the decision had been read. Unlike their post-
Heller pep talk, there's nothing arrogant or jubilant. Nothing about this being a "victory for common-sense gun laws," just doom, gloom and pleas for money.
Expect
Nordyke v. King and
Peña v. Cid to grow new legs in the wake of this, and expect a wave of challenges to various local ordinances and regulations in the coming months.
2011's going to be an interesting year for us.