This may be the single best observation made on the Supreme Court's decision to hear the District of Columbia Second Amendment case.

In recent decades, the Supreme Court has discovered any number of new rights not in the explicit text of the Constitution. Now it has the opportunity to validate a right that resides in plain sight--"the right of the people to keep and bear arms" in the Second Amendment.

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. In March, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared unconstitutional the District's near-total ban on handgun possession. That 2-1 ruling, written by Judge Laurence Silberman, found that when the Second Amendment spoke of the "right of the people," it meant the right of "individuals," and not some "collective right" held only by state governments or the National Guard.

That stirring conclusion was enough to prompt the D.C. government to declare Judge Silberman outside "the mainstream of American jurisprudence" in its petition to the Supreme Court. We've certainly come to an interesting legal place if asserting principles that appear nowhere in the Constitution is considered normal, but it's beyond the pale to interpret the words that are in the Constitution to mean what they say.

Perhaps the problem here is not one of judicial philosophy or textual interpretation. Maybe it is simply an issue of bad lighting. With all the stringent efforts to find liberal ideology hidden in constitutional shadows, penumbras, and the emanations thereof, perhaps the actual text of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have become obscured by the tripods, power lines, and lighting apparatus needed to discern putative rights, like those to an abortion or sodomy, that not even the framers of these masterpieces of liberty knew they were protecting when they wrote and adopted the documents over two centuries ago.

Posted by: Greg at 04:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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