Hypocrisy and Incompetence
That's a fair characterization of Wednesday's editorial in the New York Times on the 2nd Amendment case that will be decided next term by the Supreme Court. The hypocrisy lies in the Times' seeming horror that the case is going to the Supreme Court at all:
By agreeing yesterday to rule on whether provisions of the District of Columbia’s stringent gun control law violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into a roiling public controversy with large ramifications for public safety.
But when has the Times ever objected to the Supreme Court "inserting itself into a roiling public controversy"? Certainly not when the "roiling public controversy" involved abortion, school prayer, busing in the public schools, criminal procedure, etc.--not as long as the Court's majority was reliably liberal. Moreover, that is a silly description of the case at hand, District of Columbia v. Heller, which squarely poses the question whether the 2nd Amendment confers gun rights on individual citizens. Far from "inserting itself," the Court has agreed to review a D.C. Court of Appeals decision that found an individual right to keep and bear arms, and therefore ruled the D.C. gun control law unconstitutional.
The Court hasn't issued an opinion on the 2nd Amendment in 70 years. Far from being an artifact of "hard-right ideology," as the Times calls it, the idea that individuals have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms is widely supported by judges and scholars, including Larry Tribe, the foremost liberal student of the Constitution.
The editorialists' incompetence lies in their inability to get straight even the most elementary facts about the Court of Appeals' decision in Heller. The Times wrote:
At issue is a 2-to-1 ruling last March by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that found unconstitutional a law barring handguns in homes and requiring that shotguns and rifles be stored with trigger locks or disassembled. The ruling upheld a radical decision by a federal trial judge, who struck down the 31-year-old gun control law on spurious grounds that conform with the agenda of the anti-gun control lobby but cry out for rejection by the Supreme Court.
Oops. The Times got the history of the case wrong, as it admitted in a correction in this morning's paper:
An editorial on Wednesday about a Supreme Court gun control case incorrectly described a lower court’s decision. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the District Court and ruled Washington’s law on gun ownership unconstitutional. The District Court did not overturn the law.
The editorialists couldn't possibly have made that mistake if they had bothered to read the appellate court decision that they denounced with such vituperation. Of course, it goes without saying that they didn't read the district court decision that wasn't so "radical" after all.
Sadly, the Times' partisan tone on the 2nd Amendment and the Heller case isn't limited to the paper's editorial section; it extends to its news coverage as well. Take, for example, this swipe at the plaintiff in the case by the Times' liberal Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse:
Mr. Heller was one of six plaintiffs recruited by a wealthy libertarian lawyer, Robert A. Levy, who created and financed the lawsuit for the purpose of getting a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court.
As Ms. Greenhouse knows very well, countless plaintiffs in Supreme Court cases have been recruited and financed by the ACLU and other liberal interest groups. I doubt whether litigation costs in a single one of the Court's iconic liberal decisions were paid by the nominal plaintiff. But that is different, apparently; I don't recall Ms. Greenhouse casting aspersions on those who "created and financed" the cases so revered by the Left.
PAUL adds: This promises to be a momentous case. Our law firm is representing the District of Columbia before the Supreme Court so, unfortunately for me, I won't be writing about it.
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