Adding to the pile of things Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh feels very strongly about: Guns. Specifically, he believes American cities are not allowed to regulate guns and he appears to be quite nuts on this topic.
Indeed, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Kavanaugh has staked out an unusually strong position in favor of gun rights. In 2011, he wrote a 52-page dissent from a decision that upheld a D.C. ban on "assault weapons" and magazines of more than 10 rounds of bullets, plus broad registration requirements. [...]
"A ban on a class of arms is not an incidental regulation," he wrote. "It is equivalent to a ban on a category of speech."
Moreover, as he put it, it is not for judges to weigh public safety in evaluating whether a gun law is constitutional.
So frothing, unstable gun nuts are allowed to carry loaded assault rifles because it's the gun equivalent of free speech, and according to Kavanaugh: public safety be damned. You want to be safe, move to a country that prioritizes not getting shot in the streets, ya damn peaceniks. 'Merica's for shooting people.
This was, ahem, quite the position for a federal judge to tie himself to. By this logic grenade launchers or cruise missiles are, as a class of arms, perfectly legitimate for private stockpiling as well; if some National Rifle Association idiot feels the "free speech" need to stock five tons of ammonium nitrate in his garden shed in preparation for the Day of Explosive Reckoning, it's not clear Kavanaugh would find the leveling of a city block a compelling enough reason to stop him. If all of that sounds like a very silly and stupid argument, so be it, but it's not measurably stupider than declaring that needing more than 10 bullets at once in order to possibly murder other Americans you encounter in the middle of a dense American city is “equivalent to a ban on a category of speech.”
This is the problem with conservative jurisprudence in general: the asininity of the arguments, from the murderin' folks is free speech part to the well I don't see why public safety concerns should play a role in deciding how efficiently we're going to allow our nation's addled idiots to murder folks. If those are the standards by which we’re measuring judges these days, why not just stop people on street corners and offer them the position? You’re not going to do any worse. We seem to be choosing judges based on their ability to pad their word count, not based on rigor, consistency, or even the barest measure of common sense. Do we even have law schools anymore? Has anyone actually, you know, checked?
All right, fine, add this to the pile.
Brett Kavanaugh may have been nominated by Trump due to Kavanaugh's unique theory that presidents who may have committed criminal acts must not be investigated, for the ostensible good of the country, but that comes part and parcel with a whole lot of other very fringe theories intended to undermine the last century of American law. And the man is only where he is now thanks to his efforts beating the bushes for Vince Foster theories in the center ring of Ken Starr’s conservative conspiracy circus, so this guy is just a fountain of far-right nuttery any way you look at it.
Oh, but he's polite when carpooling so there's that. FFS, America—get it together.