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Supreme Court candidates may be down to three
So says Amy Howe, at SCOTUSBLOG. From the 2A standpoint, Thomas Hardiman seems the best. He dissented in Drake v. Filko, which upheld the NJ carry permit requirement, permits being issued on the vague standard of "justifiable need." In dissenting, Hardiman gave some very fine analyses:
"Although the State must show only a "reasonable" fit, New Jersey comes nowhere close to making the required showing. Indeed, New Jersey has presented no evidence as to how or why its interest in preventing misuse or accidental use of handguns is furthered by limiting possession to those who can show a greater need for self-defense than the typical citizen."
"The counterintuitiveness of the idea that limiting handguns to those who have a special need for self-defense reduces misuse or accidental use is borne out by the experience of other States that issue handgun permits on a shall-issue basis, which is what New Jersey's Handgun Permit Law would look like without the justifiable need requirement. For example, Florida has issued 2,525,530 handgun carry licenses since 1987. To date, Florida has revoked only 168 licenses-0.00665%--for crimes involving firearms."
"[A] rationing system that burdens the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right by simply making that right more difficult to exercise cannot be considered reasonably adapted to a governmental interest because it burdens the right too broadly."
The other two candidates are Judge William Pryor and Judge Neil Gorsuch. I can't find anything on the first, and find this opinion written by the second. It doesn't disclose a lot about his 2A views, tho.
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From a Libertarian standpoint, Pryor is an abomination. Wading through all the lefty stuff until I found something in Reason Magazine
(http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/29/the-trouble-with-trump-scotus-contender),
"Pryor's brand of conservatism was certainly on full display back in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court was weighing the constitutionality of a state law that criminalized 'homosexual conduct' in a case known as Lawrence v. Texas. At that time Pryor was working as the attorney general of Alabama (Jeff Sessions was his predecessor in that job). In a state amicus brief he filed at the Supreme Court in Lawrence, Pryor came out firmly in defense of every state's unbridled power to incarcerate consenting adults for the supposed crime of having same-sex relations in the privacy of their own homes. 'The States can and must legislate morality.' To rule otherwise, Pryor's brief declared, would be to enshrine a 'sophomoric libertarian mantra.'"
Ummm, NO.
I agree with the above two comments – William Pryor sounds like a terrible choice.
Pryor has a big problem. He's been blackmailed by Alabama gambling interests for years based on pictures Prior published in college in something called "Bad Puppy" magazine - a gay dating/escort rag. Pryor has since played the "Christian conservative" card to the hilt.
The write-up on this on Snopes doesn't have the full story. Bad Puppy briefly went online in the '90s but the pics from the original paper rag are much more obvious and even more graphic, plus they show him in his band uniform. My wife was briefly shown these years ago by the gambling tycoon who had long blackmailed Pryor.
This is very real.
Jim Simpson, formerly known as Jim March