No they are not. Overwhelming majority of NY state counties passed a resolution to repeal SAFE act. It was symbolic, but it showed how unpopular SAFE act was.
Operation - Repeal NY SAFE act
- Thread starter RDN
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No they are not. Overwhelming majority of NY state counties passed a resolution to repeal SAFE act. It was symbolic, but it showed how unpopular SAFE act was.
If it is so unpopular, why is it still here?
Listen man, I want it gone as well. Even though it affects me none, I would love to see all of these laws disappear. Not just the laws that violate the 2A, but all of the laws that violate ANY of our Constitutional Rights.
ArmedCorgi
.475 A&M Magnum
You could say the same for Cuomo.
Robin
.475 A&M Magnum
People think corruption only involves the taking of money for un scrupulous purpose. Wrong!
Robin
Robin
Why is it still here? Because NY republican party needs butt-hurt gun owners as a support base. This is why they let it pass in a first place and skipped on every opportunity to roll it back.
It should be Ah-ha, not Huh.
meketrefe
.450/400 Nitro Ex
Oh, you found that there is someone smart on this forum? ...we should celebrate that huge milestone!!! LOL
ArmedCorgi
.475 A&M Magnum
Who says we need a raisin to cel-laahbrate?
meketrefe
.450/400 Nitro Ex
ArmedCorgi
.475 A&M Magnum
We git payed hear?you mean raisin the average forum user salary? because right now it sucks!
E the massive
.308 Win
It's a game of promises to keep people sedated. "If elected I vow blah blah blah". Both sides are aware of the very serious consequences if people lose faith in the ballot box.
ETA NFL, NBA and politics all bread and circuses.
Last edited:
Interesting article from all places but the NY Times!
So it’s all over but the voting. I’m writing this column on the assumption that Judge Brett Kavanaugh will soon be Justice Kavanaugh, despite the Democrats’ continuing efforts to convert a futile battle over ideology into an ugly one over transparency and ethics. By the first Monday in October or soon thereafter, the Roberts court version 5.0 (accounting for the earlier arrival of Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch since Chief Justice John Roberts took his seat in September 2005) will be underway.
What then?
Most answers to the “What then?” question have offered side-by-side comparisons of Brett Kavanaugh and the justice he will be succeeding, Anthony Kennedy. What part of Justice Kennedy’s 30-year legacy will he embrace? What part will he repudiate?
I’d like to shift the field of vision and consider the impact of Judge Kavanaugh’s arrival on the eight other justices — on the dynamic of the Supreme Court as a whole. Justice Byron White, who saw 13 new justices take their seats during his own 31-year tenure, once remarked that every time a new justice joins the court, “it’s a different court.”
On one level, that’s a truism: In a group of people as small as nine, it’s hardly a surprise that the departure of one and arrival of another would alter some established patterns, even beyond a measurable shift in the group’s ideological midpoint. But it seems to me that Justice Kennedy’s departure and his replacement by a justice reliably to his right could well be transformative, and not just because the right to abortion may lose its tenuous hold or because the sun may finally set on affirmative action.
“Transformative” is a strong word. But consider the sustained impact that Justice Kennedy’s position in the center of the court had on colleagues both to his left and to his right. An odd-numbered court always has a center, of course, a “median justice,” in the language of political science. But Justice Kennedy was not just any median justice, and the court during the 12 years that he occupied that position after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement was not a typical Supreme Court.
People may assume that the court has usually displayed some version of 4+4+Kennedy, but that’s not the case. The current extreme polarization, with most important issues resolved by votes of 5 to 4 and one justice in a position to determine the course of constitutional law, is a historic anomaly. When I started covering the court in the late 1970s, there were three or four justices clustered at the center to whom lawyers presenting their cases had to make their pitch. (Pop quiz: What was the vote in Roe v. Wade? Answer: 7 to 2.) Number-crunching no doubt could identify one or another of this group as the median justice during a given term, but in the absence of today’s polarization, the designation had far less significance than it has attained.
Image
The justices of the Supreme Court in 2017.CreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Further enhancing Justice Kennedy’s power was his unpredictability, his ideological swings from left to right and back again. Colleagues took his vote for granted at their peril. For example, Justice Kennedy had made his opposition to affirmative action clear in case after case, so the four colleagues to his right could plausibly have assumed he would join them in voting to overturn the University of Texas admissions plan in a case that might well have provided the vehicle for ending race-conscious college admissions. Yet in two tries with cases called Fisher v. University of Texas, in 2013 and again in 2016, the four came away empty-handed as Justice Kennedy wrote opinions that left the Texas plan intact. (The four were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Alito and Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia died before the second case was decided, but he participated in the decision to put it on the court’s agenda.)
Justice Kennedy also acted as a brake on the more hard-edge positions of those to his right with whom he basically agreed. For example, deep in Justice Scalia’s lengthy opinion for a 5-to-4 majority in the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller were a few sentences suggesting that the constitutional right to individual gun ownership that the court was establishing did contain some limits. “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” Justice Scalia wrote, adding that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions of the possession of firearms.” He then listed several examples of “longstanding” prohibitions, including gun possession by people convicted of felonies and prohibitions on carrying guns “in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” (One of those “longstanding” prohibitions — for schools — has proved short-lived.)
Was this language, different in tone from the rest of the opinion and structured almost as a “by the way,” the price for Justice Kennedy’s vote? I can’t prove it, but I thought so at the time, and still do. Circumstantial proof lies in the court’s failure for the past decade to take up another Second Amendment case, despite Justice Thomas’s repeated charge that the court is turning the Second Amendment into a “constitutional orphan.” While it takes only four votes for the court to accept a case for decision, four justices who are committed to an outcome on a hot-button topic want to be able to count to five before taking the plunge. Was the gridlock because of uncertainty about whether Justice Kennedy was all in on the Second Amendment, as Judge Kavanaugh appears to be? A grant of a new Second Amendment appeal after the new justice takes his seat would prove my theory.
The court’s conservatives were not the only ones who had to modify their behavior to take account of Justice Kennedy. It often seemed to me that the court’s liberals treated him with kid gloves, signing on to opinions that they knew were weakly reasoned in order to keep him on their team, however briefly, and out of the conservatives’ clutches. The most recent example was last term’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which Justices Breyer and Kagan joined Justice Kennedy’s completely unpersuasive conclusion that a few nasty words about religion uttered by one or maybe two members of Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission turned the baker who wouldn’t bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple into a victim of religious discrimination by the state.
I guess I see the logic of Justices Breyer and Kagan bolstering Justice Kennedy and providing some insulation for him from Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, who indicated in concurring opinions that they would have ruled for the baker on more far-reaching grounds, not dependent on the supposed facts of this particular case. But did Justices Breyer and Kagan really think the multipart, multi-actor proceedings were so “infected by religious hostility” that the business owner who discriminated against a gay couple was actually himself the victim of discrimination? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissenting opinion that Justice Sotomayor joined, argued convincingly that in no way “do the comments by one or two members of one of the four decision-making entities considering this case justify reversing the judgment below.” Justices Breyer’s and Kagan’s support didn’t matter in the end anyway: Justice Kennedy had the votes he needed from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Gorsuch, along with a partial concurrence by Justice Thomas. The final vote was 7 to 2.
What will the Supreme Court look like when neither side has to walk on eggs to win the favor of the one in the middle? It will be a more conservative court, for sure, and maybe a more honest one. Justices may feel more free to say what they really think, and the public will ultimately judge the result by expressing itself in electoral politics. History does not stop in 2018.
I’ll leave the last word to Justice Kennedy. Many have remarked on the conservative turn he took during his final term on the court. There was no case in which he joined the liberal justices to make a 5-to-4 majority. One of his final opinions was an opinion concurring in the 5-to-4 decision that upheld the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. Only four paragraphs long, it was the opinion of a weary man. It was also, I think, the product of someone who, while fully aware of the troubling optics of a divided court engaging in such sweeping deference to executive authority, lacked the energy to fight his way through to the other side. His final words might, I hope, be given a strategic place somewhere at the court, perhaps in a desk drawer where a future Justice Kavanaugh might come upon them as he starts his new job.
This is what Justice Kennedy wrote: “An anxious world must know that our government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, writes on alternate Thursdays about the Supreme Court and the law. She reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008, and is the author of several books.
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So it’s all over but the voting. I’m writing this column on the assumption that Judge Brett Kavanaugh will soon be Justice Kavanaugh, despite the Democrats’ continuing efforts to convert a futile battle over ideology into an ugly one over transparency and ethics. By the first Monday in October or soon thereafter, the Roberts court version 5.0 (accounting for the earlier arrival of Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch since Chief Justice John Roberts took his seat in September 2005) will be underway.
What then?
Most answers to the “What then?” question have offered side-by-side comparisons of Brett Kavanaugh and the justice he will be succeeding, Anthony Kennedy. What part of Justice Kennedy’s 30-year legacy will he embrace? What part will he repudiate?
I’d like to shift the field of vision and consider the impact of Judge Kavanaugh’s arrival on the eight other justices — on the dynamic of the Supreme Court as a whole. Justice Byron White, who saw 13 new justices take their seats during his own 31-year tenure, once remarked that every time a new justice joins the court, “it’s a different court.”
On one level, that’s a truism: In a group of people as small as nine, it’s hardly a surprise that the departure of one and arrival of another would alter some established patterns, even beyond a measurable shift in the group’s ideological midpoint. But it seems to me that Justice Kennedy’s departure and his replacement by a justice reliably to his right could well be transformative, and not just because the right to abortion may lose its tenuous hold or because the sun may finally set on affirmative action.
“Transformative” is a strong word. But consider the sustained impact that Justice Kennedy’s position in the center of the court had on colleagues both to his left and to his right. An odd-numbered court always has a center, of course, a “median justice,” in the language of political science. But Justice Kennedy was not just any median justice, and the court during the 12 years that he occupied that position after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement was not a typical Supreme Court.
People may assume that the court has usually displayed some version of 4+4+Kennedy, but that’s not the case. The current extreme polarization, with most important issues resolved by votes of 5 to 4 and one justice in a position to determine the course of constitutional law, is a historic anomaly. When I started covering the court in the late 1970s, there were three or four justices clustered at the center to whom lawyers presenting their cases had to make their pitch. (Pop quiz: What was the vote in Roe v. Wade? Answer: 7 to 2.) Number-crunching no doubt could identify one or another of this group as the median justice during a given term, but in the absence of today’s polarization, the designation had far less significance than it has attained.
Image
The justices of the Supreme Court in 2017.CreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Further enhancing Justice Kennedy’s power was his unpredictability, his ideological swings from left to right and back again. Colleagues took his vote for granted at their peril. For example, Justice Kennedy had made his opposition to affirmative action clear in case after case, so the four colleagues to his right could plausibly have assumed he would join them in voting to overturn the University of Texas admissions plan in a case that might well have provided the vehicle for ending race-conscious college admissions. Yet in two tries with cases called Fisher v. University of Texas, in 2013 and again in 2016, the four came away empty-handed as Justice Kennedy wrote opinions that left the Texas plan intact. (The four were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Alito and Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia died before the second case was decided, but he participated in the decision to put it on the court’s agenda.)
Justice Kennedy also acted as a brake on the more hard-edge positions of those to his right with whom he basically agreed. For example, deep in Justice Scalia’s lengthy opinion for a 5-to-4 majority in the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller were a few sentences suggesting that the constitutional right to individual gun ownership that the court was establishing did contain some limits. “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” Justice Scalia wrote, adding that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions of the possession of firearms.” He then listed several examples of “longstanding” prohibitions, including gun possession by people convicted of felonies and prohibitions on carrying guns “in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” (One of those “longstanding” prohibitions — for schools — has proved short-lived.)
Was this language, different in tone from the rest of the opinion and structured almost as a “by the way,” the price for Justice Kennedy’s vote? I can’t prove it, but I thought so at the time, and still do. Circumstantial proof lies in the court’s failure for the past decade to take up another Second Amendment case, despite Justice Thomas’s repeated charge that the court is turning the Second Amendment into a “constitutional orphan.” While it takes only four votes for the court to accept a case for decision, four justices who are committed to an outcome on a hot-button topic want to be able to count to five before taking the plunge. Was the gridlock because of uncertainty about whether Justice Kennedy was all in on the Second Amendment, as Judge Kavanaugh appears to be? A grant of a new Second Amendment appeal after the new justice takes his seat would prove my theory.
The court’s conservatives were not the only ones who had to modify their behavior to take account of Justice Kennedy. It often seemed to me that the court’s liberals treated him with kid gloves, signing on to opinions that they knew were weakly reasoned in order to keep him on their team, however briefly, and out of the conservatives’ clutches. The most recent example was last term’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which Justices Breyer and Kagan joined Justice Kennedy’s completely unpersuasive conclusion that a few nasty words about religion uttered by one or maybe two members of Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission turned the baker who wouldn’t bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple into a victim of religious discrimination by the state.
I guess I see the logic of Justices Breyer and Kagan bolstering Justice Kennedy and providing some insulation for him from Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, who indicated in concurring opinions that they would have ruled for the baker on more far-reaching grounds, not dependent on the supposed facts of this particular case. But did Justices Breyer and Kagan really think the multipart, multi-actor proceedings were so “infected by religious hostility” that the business owner who discriminated against a gay couple was actually himself the victim of discrimination? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissenting opinion that Justice Sotomayor joined, argued convincingly that in no way “do the comments by one or two members of one of the four decision-making entities considering this case justify reversing the judgment below.” Justices Breyer’s and Kagan’s support didn’t matter in the end anyway: Justice Kennedy had the votes he needed from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Gorsuch, along with a partial concurrence by Justice Thomas. The final vote was 7 to 2.
What will the Supreme Court look like when neither side has to walk on eggs to win the favor of the one in the middle? It will be a more conservative court, for sure, and maybe a more honest one. Justices may feel more free to say what they really think, and the public will ultimately judge the result by expressing itself in electoral politics. History does not stop in 2018.
I’ll leave the last word to Justice Kennedy. Many have remarked on the conservative turn he took during his final term on the court. There was no case in which he joined the liberal justices to make a 5-to-4 majority. One of his final opinions was an opinion concurring in the 5-to-4 decision that upheld the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. Only four paragraphs long, it was the opinion of a weary man. It was also, I think, the product of someone who, while fully aware of the troubling optics of a divided court engaging in such sweeping deference to executive authority, lacked the energy to fight his way through to the other side. His final words might, I hope, be given a strategic place somewhere at the court, perhaps in a desk drawer where a future Justice Kavanaugh might come upon them as he starts his new job.
This is what Justice Kennedy wrote: “An anxious world must know that our government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, writes on alternate Thursdays about the Supreme Court and the law. She reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008, and is the author of several books.
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meketrefe
.450/400 Nitro Ex
You need to open an escrow account.
Divide the nr. of posts / nr. o likes and transfer the total over there.
Then this will be applied the current APR rate.
...etc.. etc...
Based on your current activity you should end up with
zero hundred thousand, zero thousand & zero hundred dollars.
ArmedCorgi
.475 A&M Magnum
BDinPutnam
.475 A&M Magnum
SNAP.
ArmedCorgi
.475 A&M Magnum
Guess I'm worthless here.
meketrefe
.450/400 Nitro Ex
Don't feel insulted. we all get the same forum user paycheck. LOL
Marine Cpl
.577 Tyrannosaur.
I got a check for $12.95 last year.
masterswimmer
.450/400 Nitro Ex
Feelin' sorry for you guys, knowing you will NEVER get your rights restored under the SCOTUS or any other. "Settled law" gives the regulation of firearms to the states and that won't change unless ------- Diamond's forecasts comes true.
Keep stockpiling that 223 ammo and non-compliant ARs ------ you may need them if Jared is right !
Keep stockpiling that 223 ammo and non-compliant ARs ------ you may need them if Jared is right !
Robin
.475 A&M Magnum
Jared one of your many butt buddy's?
Robin
Robin
livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
I was just listening to WYSL and I think it was Andrew Hollister being interviewed. He claimed it did not matter if we had the safe act overturned as the powers that be have incorporated much of the safe act into other laws thus retaining them ... Even if we got rid of everything about the act.