PINE BLUFFS – Thursday, June 26, 2008 was a very bad day for American liberals.

          Ominously, the sun, which had risen as usual over the Nation’s capital that morning, quickly disappeared behind thick clouds, and the sultry heat that characterizes the area had settled in by 10:05 a.m. when the nine black-robed Justices filed into the courtroom to announce their eagerly-awaited decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290),

          For perhaps 217 years the Supreme Court had not visited the Second Amendment authoritatively. That changed in June 2008 when, in a 5-4 decision, it overturned the District’s 29-year old ban on ownership of firearms by individuals. Specifically, the Court found that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun, at least in the home.

          As many had predicted, the Court split 5-4 on this issue. For sixteen minutes, Justice Antonin Scalia announced from the bench the majority’s reasoning. His scholarly in-depth historical analysis was loaded with detail. Scalia's opinion is classic originalism or, as some call it, strict constructionism. In 54 pages, he deployed an overwhelming argument and disposed in detail of the dissenters' "wrong headed" contentions.  He was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Justices Samual Alito, and  Clarence Thomas. And as has been the case often since the beginning of the Court’s 2006 term, Justice Anthony Kennedy supplied the “swing vote” to provide a slim majority. (See my article, Supreme Court’s Term Has Begun. What’s in Store for Pro-Lifers? October 2006; Special to saccoservices.com, where I said: “CENTRIST ANTHONY KENNEDY? Another fascinating aspect this term is the possible emergence of Justice Anthony Kennedy as a centrist power on the court. If this happens, he could provide the swing vote in key cases.”

          When Justice Scalia finished, Justice John Paul Stevens, the oldest member of the Court, followed for seven minutes, summarizing the reasons for two dissenting opinions — his and one written by Clinton appointee Justice Stephen Gerald Breyer. The  other dissenters were another Clinton appointee, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bush One appointee, David Hackett Souter. It’s amazing to me that four Justices of the United States Supreme Court are prepared to rule that the Second Amendment to our Constitution is unconstitutional. If anyone doubts where this country would be headed if the Democrats win the White House in November 2008, let him take a long, hard look at this situation.

          After Stevens concluded, the Court began its summer recess, to return on Monday, October 6, but not before Justice Scalia had said, for the majority, “it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

          Examining the words of the Amendment, the Court concluded “we find they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” — in other words, for self-defense. “The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right,” it added.

          The individual right interpretation, the Court said, “is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment,” going back to 17th Century England, as well as by gun rights laws in the states before and immediately after the Amendment was put into the U.S. Constitution. What Congress did in drafting the Amendment, the Court said, was “to codify a pre-existing right, rather than to fashion a new one.”

          Justice Scalia’s opinion stressed that the Court was not casting doubt on long-standing bans on carrying concealed weapons or on gun possession by felons or the mentally retarded, on laws barring guns from schools or government buildings, and laws attaching conditions to gun sales.

          And the Court took no position on whether the Second Amendment right restricts only federal government powers, or also curbs the power of states to regulate guns. In a footnote, Scalia said that the issue of “incorporating” the Second into the Fourteenth Amendment, thus applying it to the states, was “a question not presented by this case.” But the footnote said decisions in 1886 and 1894 had reaffirmed that the Amendment “applies only to the Federal Government.” Whether or not the Court will reopen that issue will depend upon future cases, which will develop further law on the issue.

          Justice Scalia also demolished the most recent precedent on the Second Amendment — the ruling in U.S. v. Miller in 1939, relied upon heavily by advocates of gun control (and by the dissenting Justices on Thursday). The opinion tartly remarked: “It is particularly wrongheaded to read Miller for more than what it said, because the case did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment.”

          The Heller decision nullified two provisions of Washington’s strict 1976 gun control law: a flat ban on possessing a gun in one’s home, and a requirement that any gun — except one kept at a business — must be unloaded and disassembled or have a trigger lock in place. The Court said it was not passing on a part of the law requiring that guns be licensed. It said that issuing a license to a handgun owner, so the weapon can be used at home, would be a sufficient remedy for the Second Amendment violation of denying any access to a handgun.

          While the declaration of the individual’s right to keep and bear arms was clear-cut, as was the decision’s nullification of key parts of the Washington, D.C. law, the Court did not lay down a standard for judging the constitutionality of any other federal laws — an omission that the dissenters attacked strongly. Even so, the opinion made it clear that, whatever ultimate test might emerge, it probably would be a tough one to meet, at least when self-defense is at issue. As Justice Scalia put it, whatever remains for “future evaluation” about the strength of the right, “it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”

          So upset were the liberal media over the outcome that they spun the decision to favor their own misguided agenda – recognizing the constitutional right to own guns by individuals and allowing them to possess handguns will result in more, not less crime. Yet keeping honest, law-abiding people unarmed and at the mercy of armed and violent criminals was never a good idea. Since 1976 only lawbreakers – the bad guys in our Nation’s capital – have possessed guns. Ordinary citizens, deprived of their legitimate right of self defense, were helpless in the face of this onslaught from the criminal element, as the District of Columbia’s murder rate increased annually, despite the strictest laws in the Nation against possession of guns. From 26.8 murders per every 100,000 inhabitants in 1976, it rose steadily to a peak in 1991, 15 years after the City Council banned guns, when 482 people were murdered and the murder rate stood at an astonishing 80.6 murders per every 100,000 D.C. residents. In 2006, Washington’s murder rate stood at 29 murders per every 100,000 people. 

          During the 24 hour period immediately following the Court’s ruling, the media’s tact was to focus only on Justice Breyer’s dissent. Had they publicized Scalia’s well-reasoned majority opinion, they might have successfully educated the American people on one of the individual rights contained in our Constitution. Not doing so certainly points to an American Press clearly failing in its duty to educate Americans.  In Breyer’s separate dissent he said, "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas." Justice Breyer does not live in crime-ridden urban areas such as Anacostia, for example.

          D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty responded quickly to the Court’s decision with a plan to require residents to register their handguns. "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," he announced.

          But fears of this nature clearly ignore the experience of many states which, in the last 30 years, have enacted, for instance, concealed carry laws. Let’s examine that issue a bit, because it’s germane to what’s now being heard from liberal quarters, and will continue to be heard for some time:

          Since 1986 the number of states making it legal to carry concealed weapons has grown from 9 to 31. Contrary to the claims of opponents of right-to-carry laws, liberalized concealed carry has not endangered public safety. Rather, right-to-carry laws have contributed to widely-reported declining crime.

          Some opponents of concealed carry laws argue that there are no good reasons to carry a handgun. The reality is that criminals commit nearly 10 million violent crimes a year in the United States. Nationwide, with only than 75,000 to 80,000 police officers on duty at any one time, police are simply unable to prevent most of the crimes that occur. This means that citizens are ultimately responsible for their own defense. Fortunately, research shows that they are often up to the task. The media does not report that victims use firearms approximately 2.5 million times each year in self-defense, according to Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. That point has been made by D.C. residents over and over again since 1976, when the Council took away their right to keep firearms in their homes for self-defense.

            Vermont is another case in point. That state has long had both the least restrictive firearms carry laws, allowing citizens to carry guns either openly or concealed without any permit. It has some of the lowest violent crime numbers in the country. For instance, in 1980, when murders and robberies in the U.S. had soared to 10 and 251 per 100,000 population respectively, Vermont's murder rate was 22 percent of the national murder rate and its robbery rate was 15 percent.

          But back to the issue at hand. In his dissent summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons." That’s exactly what they did when they wrote the Second Amendment. Controlling governmental interference was deemed far more important than any compelling interest the state might have in eliminating the individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

PINE BLUFFS – Webster’s Dictionary defines "muddle through" as "to succeed in spite of apparent blunders or confusion." On the political scene, I think that's what we've been doing for the past twenty months or so: muddling through. We've seen the Democrats reject "the smartest woman in America" in favor of "the first legitimate black presidential candidate" – forget about Al (Tawana Brawley) Sharpton and the “Reverend” (champion blackmailer) Jesse Jackson, both of whom had previously run for that office - leaving liberal women dazed, confused and a trifle bitter.

          We've watched the Republicans sift through a field of primary candidates which included an astute evangelical Christian, an attractive Mormon, and a Libertarian, selecting instead a seventy-one year old Senator from Arizona, a Navy veteran and former POW, a sometime conservative whose chief claim to fame has been his reputation as a political maverick, or, as his campaign committee puts it, someone who “displays the bipartisan ability to work with people on both sides of the aisle.”

        When we lifted our weary heads from politics ad nauseam, we were treated to the power of a free market's inherent capacity to adjust to problems in a way that no centrally planned economy can. Stumbling, bumbling, the market dealt with the aftermath - a cruel one, some said - of a housing bubble inflated by greedy realtors, slack underwriting standards, and lots of reckless, stupid and avaricious behavior by both borrowers and lenders, which produced larger than normal default rates on sub-prime mortgages. Borrowers who gobbled up adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) eagerly offered by irresponsible lenders several years ago got their come uppance when their new rates kicked in and they found themselves unable to afford the much higher monthly mortgage payments on their homes. For these people, and for liberals - read bleeding hearts - it's always someone else's fault, and no one, absolutely no one, should have to heed the warning, caveat emptor, or be forced to bear the consequences of their ill considered actions. Loud cries for a government bail-out of the sub-prime mortgage industry have been heard, and to a certain extent, they have not fallen on deaf ears in this politically hot election year.

           Through it all, the ACLU and its ilk combined with radical secularist judges, have continued efforts to outlaw all references to God, religious symbols, and prayer from the public square. The homosexual movement, with the help of an ultra-liberal California Supreme Court that defied the popular will of 61% of California voters – 4.6 million of them - won a victory which, if allowed to stand, could change the public face of America.

          But it’s heartening to see that these societal trends are no longer going unopposed. Groups like Alan Sears and his Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), Newt Gingerich and his Citizens United Foundation, and Tom Fitton's Judicial Watch, have sprung up and are standing in the breach, while citizens across America are becoming more sophisticated and more ready to defend their traditional values against all comers.

         Turning back to politics, I believe one very good thing has emerged from this "long night of our political soul," to borrow from St. John of the Cross, which will not end until November 2008. What? Could there possibly be a bright spot in all this?

          Yes. It's the end of the Clinton era. Democrat voters across the country appear to have taken a long, thoughtful look at Hillary Rodham (I can't recall) Clinton's campaign, remembered that her husband, when he was running for President had once remarked: "You vote for me, you get Hillary," and realized that if they nominated Hillary for President, the reverse of his comment could become reality. Fortunately for America, they said, "No, thanks!" No thanks to Bill Clinton’s serial adultery, sexual harassments, and even a credible rape accusation, and his perjured testimony in a civil case which led to a charge of contempt of court, a $90,000 fine, and disbarment by the Arkansas Bar Association. They said no thanks to Hillary’s own record of scandals; her mysterious $100,000 profit in the cattle futures market back in the ‘70s, her legal work for the corrupt Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, the Whitewater real estate (ad)venture in the ‘80s, the White House Travel Office caper, which destroyed reputations and lives, and the illegal retention of FBI files in the ‘90s. 

          Of course, Barack Hussein (America is a wonderful country. Help me change it) Obama might still bow to pressure from the feminist world and some elements of the Media to create a "Dream Ticket" by selecting Hillary as his running mate, but I really don't think he'd be that stupid. 

         So I think the Clinton era is over. "Never! Never again" America's embarrassment at their hands. There's just one thing left to say to them as they fade quietly from the scene, as I and many others earnestly hope they will:  

          Requiescat in pace!

PINE BLUFFS - According to the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, reckless government spending could destroy any chance the country has for a strong economic recovery.

Heritage Foundation president, Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D understands that the current explosion of wasteful spending isn’t a new phenomenon, but he thinks it has greatly expanded under congressional and White House leaders once thought to be conservative and fiscally responsible. Many political pundits believe that irresponsible spending caused some conservative voters to stay away from the polls in November 2006, thus helping liberal extremists like Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her sidekick, Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s hard to fault that assessment.

And conservatives may do the same thing in 2008. If we do, watch out! If you thought spending was bad in a Republican Congress – one that at least appeared conservative going in – just think what will happen with tax and spend liberals calling the shots.

Since the Democrats gained control of Congress, they have wasted billions on special interest “pork barrel” projects paid for with our tax dollars – to the tune of approximately $17 billion in 2008 so far. “That’s $17 billion that could have been spent to bail out Medicare and Social Security, or to secure the borders [and seaports], and win the War on Terrorism,” Feulner says.

Congressional lawmakers have been allowed to slip their “earmarks” – voters have been onto pork barreling for a long time, so Congress gave it a different name - into the federal budget anonymously, so they don’t have to take responsibility for pork spending. And numerous projects are approved by “voice votes” in those hallowed halls; now lawmakers need not go on record supporting lavish spending – even when they do support lavish spending.

And thanks to a combination of waste, fraud, and incompetence, the federal government will spend over $25 thousand per household this year – up more than $4 thousand since 2001.

All that spending is funded by borrowed money. This year, the budget deficit could hit $400 billion, with our national debt soaring to $9 trillion.

“That this runaway spending has occurred under a conservative president, while conservatives were still in control of Congress, is proof,” Feulner asserts, “that even the most principled leaders in Washington, D.C. face intense pressure from powerful special interests to spend taxpayers money on their pet projects.” Just look at these two as examples:

·         $4.8 million for wood utilization research. Since 1985, taxpayers have been billed $90 million for this research.

·         $3 million for shrimp aquaculture research. Again, since 1985, taxpayers have dished out about $70 million for research into a little shellfish.

          And now that liberals are in the driver’s seat, the pressure to spend our tax dollars – and politician’s willingness to do it, will only increase.

However, there’s been some good news from Congress lately. Apparently fed up with these shenanigans, the House Republican caucus recently called for an immediate end to pork-barrel earmarks as a first step towards spending reform, and President Bush sent a memo to all Cabinet agencies instructing them “to ignore earmarks originating in Congress that were not voted on by the full Congress.” Too little, too late? We’ll see.

But this stuff won’t change after Election Day 2008 if either Barack Hussein (America is a wonderful country; help me change it) Obama or Hillary Rodham (I can’t recall) Clinton are elected. In fact, on Face the Nation (Sunday 5/25/08), Howard Wolfson, a Clinton camp representative, in response to a question, either misspoke, suspended his thinking for a cloudy moment, or in an appeal to Clinton supporters after Obama wins the Democrat nomination next month, said: “There’s really very little difference between Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama.”

Too true. Both are tax and spend liberals who, it seems, have a love affair with European-style Socialism. Their grandiose plans will increase – not decrease – the size and power of the federal government and its ability to tax and tax, spend and spend.

It’s a basic tenet of liberal economics that high taxes are good for America because they mean more government spending and greater benefits for society. This view has been repeatedly debunked, yet leftist economists persist with ever more creative justifications for penalizing hard work and investment. “In recent years,” reports Heritage Foundation economist J.D. Foster, “some [higher tax] advocates have shifted to arguing that higher taxes are benign with respect to the economy and, in some circumstances, can actu­ally enhance economic performance.” That’s right: they believe higher taxes can improve the economy. “This is nonsense,” Foster writes of this left-wing tripe. In fact, “clear and compelling evidence shows that higher taxes reduce economic output.” Furthermore, “the modern historical record strongly suggests a clear and robust relation­ship between lower taxes and higher economic output.”
          Actually, the only theoretical upside to higher taxes—deficit reduction that leads to reduced interest rates —“is superficially appealing” yet ultimately “threadbare.” This is because the substantial downsides to the tax increases on the table —“poten­tially significant losses in both business investment and labor supply”— greatly outweigh the modest purported benefits. “As a first priority,” Foster concludes, “federal, state, and local policymakers should eschew tax increases. As the tax burden in the United States continues to rise, policymakers at all levels of government should pursue tax relief to preserve and enhance a strong economy.”

To “preserve and enhance a strong economy” may have been the thought behind the recent tax rebate scheme, whereby congressional Democrats advocated giving $1,200 to each American family. Of course, like the rest of us, I like the idea of receiving that windfall, and I certainly won’t refuse it. However, at best that’s a short-term solution of doubtful merit as a means to stimulate a moderately troubled economy; tax rate cuts would have been a far better option. As a tactic to garner votes however, the rebate thing does have great political appeal. It remains to be seen whether recipients of this government windfall will spend that money, use it to retire debt, or sock it away in the bank.

   Anthony J. Sacco, a writer, licensed private investigator, author of two novels; The China Connection, and Little Sister Lost, and a biography, Echoes in the Wind, holds degrees from Loyola College of Maryland and the University of Maryland Law School. His articles have appeared in the Washington Times, Baltimore Sun, Voices for the Unborn, the Catholic Review, WREN Magazine and the Wyoming Catholic Register. E-mail him at anthonyjsacco@hotmail.com, and visit his website at www.saccoservices.com.