Tom609
Member
Bashing New Jersey is about as common around here as a round of trap. How about another perspective that shows you panty-waist heartland types just how much you owe NJ for your 2A freedom (said with tongue in cheek)
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/mulshine/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1214886926327450.xml&coll=1
Jersey-born judges get it right on guns
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
I was walking around Rutgers the other day when I came upon a memorial to students who had fought in World War II. The list of names was impressive, but I imagine most major universities in America have similar memorials.
It was only when I happened to walk by Old Queens that I noticed something you wouldn't see on just any campus. It was a plaque honoring the Rutgers men who had fought in the Revolutionary War. Nearby is the spot from which Alexander Hamilton directed cannon fire against the British in cover of George Washington's army.
You don't see that sort of thing in the so-called heartland, which would be in the heart of nowhere if not for the Jersey boys. Yet hardly a day goes by that I don't receive an e-mail from some self-proclaimed 100 percent American in a red state informing me that I can't possibly be a true conservative because I and my newspaper column originate here in New Jersey.
I am thankful to Antonin Scalia and Sam Alito for forever laying that myth to rest. It is a curious fact that two-ninths of the membership of the U.S. Supreme Court originates in that city where George Washington so famously routed the Hessians back in 1776. And the Trenton two were instrumental in the historic decision last week that, to the consternation of liberals everywhere, returned the Constitution to its revolutionary roots.
That was, of course, the decision in the case of D.C. vs. Heller, in which the court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means what it says. And what it says is that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
You might argue that anyone could have concluded the same. But the genius of the Jersey-born Scalia was in expressing that opinion in terms that are irrefutable even to liberals. Liberals love to argue in favor of both individual rights and the right of revolution, assuming the revolutionary in question looks good on a T-shirt, à la Che Guevara. Well, if that's what you like, said Scalia, then you shall have it. He went out of his way to ground the Second Amendment right to bear arms in the right of citizens to rebel against an oppressive government.
With that task accomplished, Scalia went on to make it plain that the right to self-defense is every bit as much of an individual right as the First Amendment right to free speech. He cited an 1803 version of Blackstone's Commentaries that put Second Amendment rights on the same plane as First Amendment rights and said that in both cases the courts are sworn to protect those rights from overbearing politicians.
This left liberals nowhere to stand on principle. So they turned to politics. In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that "there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."
Again, this is a subject a Jersey guy would know a bit more about than the California-born Breyer. Though Scalia left Trenton as a lad, his parents took him to New York City, then quite a rowdy spot. Alito, meanwhile, was until recently working in Newark, a city whose virtues in that regard I need not list.
Here is where we come to a crucial difference between liberals and conservatives. Implicit in the liberal view is the idea that rights must be trimmed to fit the behavior of the citizenry. The conservative, meanwhile, argues that rights are eternal while social conditions are temporary.
Andrew Napolitano, the third in the triumvirate of great Italian-American legal minds from Jersey, shares with Alito and Scalia what he calls an indispensable link to the great tradition they espouse, the fact of growing up in "a traditional Italian Catholic household."
Napolitano, a former Superior Court judge on the Jersey bench who is now a Fox News legal analyst, said this family history links all three to a conservative tradition perhaps lacking in the heartland -- the Catholic tradition of natural law as elucidated by Thomas Aquinas.
"The most important thing in the opinion is that the right to self-defense is a natural right," said Napolitano, who attended Princeton with Alito. "You have right to defend yourself against unjust use of power."
That principle is now explicitly enshrined in constitutional law for the first time since the founding. And it is a principle that, perhaps more than any other, defines the difference between liberals and conservatives.
So for all those people in the red states who write me e-mails questioning how someone from Jersey can be a conservative, there's your answer. Our revolutionary history is better than yours. And our conservative intellectuals are smarter than yours.
Paul Mulshine may be reached at [email protected]. To comment on his column, go to NJVoices.com.
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/mulshine/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1214886926327450.xml&coll=1
Jersey-born judges get it right on guns
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
I was walking around Rutgers the other day when I came upon a memorial to students who had fought in World War II. The list of names was impressive, but I imagine most major universities in America have similar memorials.
It was only when I happened to walk by Old Queens that I noticed something you wouldn't see on just any campus. It was a plaque honoring the Rutgers men who had fought in the Revolutionary War. Nearby is the spot from which Alexander Hamilton directed cannon fire against the British in cover of George Washington's army.
You don't see that sort of thing in the so-called heartland, which would be in the heart of nowhere if not for the Jersey boys. Yet hardly a day goes by that I don't receive an e-mail from some self-proclaimed 100 percent American in a red state informing me that I can't possibly be a true conservative because I and my newspaper column originate here in New Jersey.
I am thankful to Antonin Scalia and Sam Alito for forever laying that myth to rest. It is a curious fact that two-ninths of the membership of the U.S. Supreme Court originates in that city where George Washington so famously routed the Hessians back in 1776. And the Trenton two were instrumental in the historic decision last week that, to the consternation of liberals everywhere, returned the Constitution to its revolutionary roots.
That was, of course, the decision in the case of D.C. vs. Heller, in which the court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means what it says. And what it says is that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
You might argue that anyone could have concluded the same. But the genius of the Jersey-born Scalia was in expressing that opinion in terms that are irrefutable even to liberals. Liberals love to argue in favor of both individual rights and the right of revolution, assuming the revolutionary in question looks good on a T-shirt, à la Che Guevara. Well, if that's what you like, said Scalia, then you shall have it. He went out of his way to ground the Second Amendment right to bear arms in the right of citizens to rebel against an oppressive government.
With that task accomplished, Scalia went on to make it plain that the right to self-defense is every bit as much of an individual right as the First Amendment right to free speech. He cited an 1803 version of Blackstone's Commentaries that put Second Amendment rights on the same plane as First Amendment rights and said that in both cases the courts are sworn to protect those rights from overbearing politicians.
This left liberals nowhere to stand on principle. So they turned to politics. In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that "there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."
Again, this is a subject a Jersey guy would know a bit more about than the California-born Breyer. Though Scalia left Trenton as a lad, his parents took him to New York City, then quite a rowdy spot. Alito, meanwhile, was until recently working in Newark, a city whose virtues in that regard I need not list.
Here is where we come to a crucial difference between liberals and conservatives. Implicit in the liberal view is the idea that rights must be trimmed to fit the behavior of the citizenry. The conservative, meanwhile, argues that rights are eternal while social conditions are temporary.
Andrew Napolitano, the third in the triumvirate of great Italian-American legal minds from Jersey, shares with Alito and Scalia what he calls an indispensable link to the great tradition they espouse, the fact of growing up in "a traditional Italian Catholic household."
Napolitano, a former Superior Court judge on the Jersey bench who is now a Fox News legal analyst, said this family history links all three to a conservative tradition perhaps lacking in the heartland -- the Catholic tradition of natural law as elucidated by Thomas Aquinas.
"The most important thing in the opinion is that the right to self-defense is a natural right," said Napolitano, who attended Princeton with Alito. "You have right to defend yourself against unjust use of power."
That principle is now explicitly enshrined in constitutional law for the first time since the founding. And it is a principle that, perhaps more than any other, defines the difference between liberals and conservatives.
So for all those people in the red states who write me e-mails questioning how someone from Jersey can be a conservative, there's your answer. Our revolutionary history is better than yours. And our conservative intellectuals are smarter than yours.
Paul Mulshine may be reached at [email protected]. To comment on his column, go to NJVoices.com.
