Justice Jackson

I’ve noticed that she likes to write her own little pieces. Almost as if she wanted the attention.

One of my favorite Jackson statements was something similar to “that would make it too hard for the government.”

It is always nice when a Justice tells us they are biased. She thinks she is better than those that who sat for Bruen. Regardless, even she agrees that Bruen affirming Heller is binding law. No two-step shuffle anymore. No interest balancing. The weakest Justice on the court sees it, so to should inferior courts.

The apparent difficulty that she is seeing is inferior courts attempting to circumvent the clear instructions in Bruen. Is it an arm? Does somebody want to keep or bear it? The Second Amendment’s plain text is implicated. The burden shifts to the state.

This isn’t difficult. Any judge or lawyer that wasn’t result/agenda driven could see that.

“It’s too hard!” they scream. Yes, it is too difficult to infringe on The People and not sound like a pretzel maker.

They are struggling because they lost the game. The two-step shuffle of deciding how much she was raped, and then deciding if the rapist (state) had a good enough reason for raping. She wasn’t wearing a full-body sack, she forced that rapist to rape her.

That’s correct, Justice Jackson. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.. That is the principle underlying the Second Amendment. The state if forbidden to infringe.

Of course, she shows her ignorance: When this Court adopts a new legal standard, as we did in Bruen …—id. The Supreme Court did not adopt a new legal standard. They affirmed Heller. There is no Bruen methodology. There is no Bruen legal standard. There is only Heller.

Bruen was a slap down of the inferior courts refusing to follow instructions. The Bruen court used baby language so judges, such as then Judge Jackson, would have had a chance of understanding them. Obviously, she didn’t.

She then spends a page of text and a page of footnotes to tell us that the inferior courts are refusing to follow the clear guidance in Bruen. Since they are refusing, Bruen must be wrong.

She is firmly of the opinion that interest balancing is the correct methodology given Heller, but that Heller was decided wrong as well.

There is so much to unpack in this one paragraph. First, she insults the Bruen court by calling it “Bruen‘s madness”. I’m a nobody. I am not a lawyer. The only thing that keeps me from using gutter language to describe her behavior is that I am not willing to write that way. (most of the time)

It is not a “history and tradition test”. It is the state’s burden to … demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation—New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022). That word, “and”, is too loose and we should not use it. It is not a “history test” and a “tradition test”. It is the history of this Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation.

This means that not only must there be a historical regulation, that regulation must form a part of a tradition. It must have been adopted in multiple jurisdictions, and it must have lasted for a reasonable amount of time.

Your little rinky-dink town passing a city ordinance banning muskets in 1795 is a historical firearm regulation. It is in the correct time-period. It is part of the founding era. It wasn’t widely adopted. That fails the “tradition” part of the test. It didn’t last long. Again, that fails the “tradition” part of the test.

This is a Justice and before that, a Judge who had no problem finding all types of burdensome regulations on The People perfectly acceptable. But telling the state to do their job, correctly, is too much of a burden on the state.

Some illegal alien shows up in court and the judge doesn’t even listen to the opening statements before deporting him because it is too burdensome to listen to his sob story would be, rightfully, dressed down by Justice Jackson.

This frame of reference runs through every opinion of hers I’ve read. She wants to make it easier for the government, never for The People.

As I’ve said before, the only “experts” that testify on legal matters are the lawyers. The parties do not bring in experts to give “expert opinion on law”. That is for the court to decide and the parties to argue. When a “Scholar” gives their opinion, it means nothing.

I had a friend who was abused as a child. This led to her not wanting to “make decisions”. Making a choice meant that she would be held responsible, which would lead to abuse.

When I first met her, she wouldn’t decide. If she had to decide, she would go from expert to expert until she heard a decision she wanted to hear, even if she didn’t acknowledge that was what she was doing. At that point, she would do what the expert had told her to do, which just so happened to be what she wanted to do. But it was all the expert’s fault, not hers, if something went wrong.

In a case where the court allows experts to voice opinions on the law, those experts will have been chosen because their opinion is the same as the party who hired them.

I don’t care if some “scholar” says that some lower courts are rogue and some are following the Heller methodology. All that means is that the inferior courts are refusing to follow the clear instructions of Bruen. It doesn’t indicate that Bruen was wrongly decided.

The People were being abused by the state, but there was harmony, so it was ok.

“Which first recognized…”, I think I’ve heard this one from whining children, “nobody told me I couldn’t do this bad thing.” The reason this was the first time the Supreme Court issued a ruling on the Second Amendment, was because the state wasn’t mucking around claiming that the Second Amendment only applied to the militia before the 60s.

When you read the congressional records for the NFA and other early gun control at the Federal level, they always found a way to bind it to something in the Constitution. The NFA isn’t a gun control act. No, No. It is a revenue act. Never mind that the state has spent more money administrating and enforcing the NFA than they every “earned” from transfer stamps.

The argument, in the infringing states, went something like this: “well regulated militia” means heavily regulated by the state, to the point where there was only one official militia, the national guard of the state. Since only the militia had standing, not “The People”, only the militia, which was the state, could challenge a state infringement.

Ok. My blood pressure is going up and up. I’ll leave you with two final quotes, footnotes from Justice Jackson’s concurrence.

Except that lawyers take pre-law and then go to law school to gain the specialized education, knowledge, and training to research historical regulations. Every time Justice Jackson cites some case, she is doing exactly the type of historical research that Bruen told the courts to do.

Allow me to offer this small lesson in law, to the great Justice Jackson, from this author:

The Founding Fathers were much wiser than Justice Jackson. They understood that the Constitution would need to change. They documented exactly how to do so. “Democratic engagement” is another phrase for “mob rule”. If there is some helpful innovation, then propose an amendment and let The People decide.