... the Supreme Court has now set the stage for the most significant case since Roe v. Wade. Indeed, this litigation implicates the future of the Republic as Roe never did. On both the individual-mandate and Medicaid-coercion issues, the Court will decide whether the Constitution's structure -- federalism and enumeration of powers -- is judicially enforceable or whether Congress is the sole judge of its own authority. In other words, do we have a government of laws or men?

[CT Supreme Court Justice] Palmer should be sorry. So should U.S. Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy, whose five votes upheld Palmer's erroneous judgment and put the final nail in the coffin.

... I do think that there's a real problem with America's current legal environment, and I think that we're in pretty much the same situation as Greece: If we want the kind of economic growth it's going to take to get us out of our current economic and indebtedness crisis, we're going to have to drastically reduce the number of laws and regulations confronting new and existing businesses.

The Obama administration attempted to cloak an unprecedented and unsupportable exercise of federal power in the guise of a run-of-the-mill Commerce Clause regulation. When the weakness of that theory was exposed, it retreated to the Necessary and Proper Clause and the taxing power. Judge Vinson's decisive rejection of all these theories is another significant victory for individual liberty -- the ultimate purpose of federalism -- and it lays the intellectual groundwork for every decision on the mandate yet to come.

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?

Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.
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If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.
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What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should "consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance," as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court's gun control decision.

But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not."
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Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through the media.
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The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public's job. The media's job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant and filter the news to fit the media's vision.

As [Supreme Court Justice John Paul] Stevens departs, the eight remaining justices are all products of the Harvard, Yale or Columbia law schools; all are former federal judges. Professor Terri L. Peretti, a Santa Clara University political scientist, notes (in Judicature, November-December 2007) that the court has often included judges with political experience.

The greatest justice, John Marshall, who made the court a nation-shaping force, had been a state legislator and congressman. Between 1789 and 1952, most justices had some legislative or executive political experience. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former president, was followed by Charles Evans Hughes, a former New York governor. Hugo Black had been a senator from Alabama. Earl Warren had been California's governor, which became a problem: Because President Dwight Eisenhower, like many others, believed that political thinking sometimes supplanted jurisprudential reasoning in Warren's decision-making, he sought judicial experience in his remaining four nominees.

In 1971, Richard Nixon nominated the last two justices without such experience, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell. The last justice with experience in elective politics was Sandra Day O'Connor, who had been an Arizona state legislator before becoming a judge.

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the court's oldest member and leader of its liberal bloc, says he is retiring. President Barack Obama now has his second high court opening to fill.

Stevens says he will step down when the court finishes its work for the summer in late June or early July.

"No family household shall purchase more than 24 cases of 12 bottles of 750 milliliters of wine in one year."