Isn’t it pretty to think that Scalia really believed this?
But if you look, for example, at the 2nd Amendment, it says that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’.
If you then look at Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia et al v. Heller, he says that the 2nd Amendment is consistent with ‘longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms’.
So did he believe that that felons and the mentally ill are not ‘people’? Or that rights disappear in ‘sensitive places’? Or that imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sales of firearms is not an ‘infringement’? Or that if an infringement has been around for long enough, then a clear textual prohibition against the infringement can be ignored?
It’s pretty clear that he thought the 2nd Amendment does say some things that it clearly doesn’t say, and doesn’t say some things that it clearly does say.
Scalia talked a good game, but when push came to shove, he was far closer to the ‘living organism’ view than the ‘legal document’ view. Sort of like President Reagan, who talked a lot about making government smaller, but presided over far more government growth than either Clinton or Obama.
Or for that matter, like President Lincoln, who famously said that ‘Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better’, and then killed half a million people who tried to do just that.
As Emerson said: Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. It’s something to keep in mind as we move through yet another season of campaign rhetoric.
