Who do we like for the next Scotus pick?

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masterswimmer

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Seems Hardiman would make the libs heads explode. I like that :D

Thomas Hardiman, possible Supreme Court nominee, seen as ‘Second Amendment extremist’

By Emma BrownJuly 6 at 11:35 AMEmail the author
In the wake of mass shootings that have divided the country on the issue of gun control, President Trump is considering nominating to the Supreme Court an appellate judge who has argued that Americans have a constitutional right not only to keep guns at home — as the high court has ruled — but also to carry them in public.

U.S. Appeals Court Judge Thomas M. Hardiman has also written that convicted criminals, including some felons, should be able to recover their right to own and carry guns, as long as their crimes were not violent.

Constitutional-law scholars and advocates on both sides of the gun debate say that Hardiman — who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit and maintains chambers in Pittsburgh — holds a more expansive view of the Second Amendment than the Supreme Court has articulated to date. His nomination and confirmation would push the court to the right, they say, making it more likely that justices would agree to hear cases challenging gun laws — and perhaps to strike them down.

Read more:Thomas Hardiman, possible Supreme Court nominee, seen as ‘Second Amendment extremist’
 
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MikeyCNY

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MikeyCNY said:
Brett Kavanaugh gets it...

Thoughts?
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SCOTUS Contender Brett Kavanaugh on Gun Rights, Search and Seizure, and Mens Rea
SCOTUS Contender Brett Kavanaugh on Gun Rights, Search and Seizure, and Mens Rea
The D.C. Circuit judge is a strong defender of the Second Amendment but seems less inclined to accept Fourth Amendment claims.
Last week I suggested that whoever replaces Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court probably will be more receptive to cases that challenge gun control laws on Second Amendment grounds. That certainly seems to be true of Brett Kavanaugh, who by some accounts is the leading contender for Donald Trump's second Supreme Court nomination, which the president plans to announce on Monday night.

Kavanaugh, who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since 2006, dissented from a 2011 decision in which a three-judge panel upheld the District of Columbia's ban on so-called assault weapons and its requirement that all guns be registered. Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority's use of "intermediate scrutiny," saying an analysis "based on text, history, and tradition" is more consistent with the Supreme Court's Second Amendment precedents.

The D.C. "assault weapon" ban covers a list of specific models as well as guns that meet certain criteria. A semi-automatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine is illegal, for instance, if it has any of six prohibited features, including an adjustable stock, a pistol grip, or a flash suppressor. "The list appears to be haphazard," Kavanaugh noted. "It bans certain semi-automatic rifles but not others—with no particular explanation or rationale for why some made the list and some did not." In any case, he concluded, the law is inconsistent with the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, he wrote an opinion rejecting FEC rules that made it harder for advocacy groups to raise money.

The FEC regulations, which were challenged by the abortion-rights group Emily's List, required nonprofit organizations to pay for election-related activities largely with "hard money" subject to donation limits. "Because donations to those hard-money accounts are capped at $5000 annually for individual contributors," Kavanaugh noted, "the FEC's allocation regulations substantially restrict the ability of non-profits to spend money for election-related activities such as advertisements, get-out-the-vote efforts, and voter registration drives." That burden, he concluded, cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment, which "protects the right of individual citizens to spend unlimited amounts to express their views about policy issues and candidates for public office" as well as "the right of citizens to band together and pool their resources as an unincorporated group or non-profit organization in order to express their views."

Kavanaugh seems to take a narrower view of Fourth Amendment rights. In 2010 he dissented from the D.C. Circuit's decision not to rehear a case in which a three-judge panel had ruled that police violated a suspected drug dealer's Fourth Amendment rights when they tracked his movements for a month by attaching a GPS device to his car without a warrant. Kavanaugh rejected the idea that the tracking constituted a search because of the quality and quantity of information it collected, although he anticipated the argument that ultimately persuaded a majority of the Supreme Court: that the physical intrusion required to plant the tracking device amounted to a search.

That rationale would not support invoking the Fourth Amendment in cases where information is collected without trespassing on someone's physical property, as when police use cellphone location records to figure out where a suspect was at particular times on particular dates. Last month the Supreme Court ruled that looking at such data is a search, meaning it generally requires a warrant.

Kavanaugh also dissented in a 2008 case involving a man named Paul Askew, who was stopped by D.C. police because his clothing was similar to an armed robber's. The cops patted Askew down for weapons, as permitted under the 1968 Supreme Court ruling in Terry v. Ohio, but found nothing. Later they unzipped his coat, supposedly to facilitate an eyewitness identification, and found a gun.

The D.C. Circuit concluded that police went too far when they unzipped Askew's coat and that the gun, which became the basis for a weapons charge, should not have been admitted as evidence against him because it was the product of an illegal search. Kavanaugh disagreed, saying unzipping the coat could be justified as "an objectively reasonable protective step to ensure officer safety" after Askew "actively resisted" the pat-down or because "police may reasonably maneuver a suspect's outer clothing—such as unzipping a suspect's outer jacket—when, as here, doing so could help facilitate a witness's identification at a show-up during a Terry stop."

While Kavanaugh typically has not sided with criminal defendants, whether they were seeking to overturn their convictions or shorten their sentences, there are some notable exceptions. In 2012, for instance, he wrote the majority opinion that overturned a military commission's conviction of Salim Hamdan, who admitted serving as Osama bin Laden's driver, for providing material support to terrorism:
 
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