We can’t have sane gun laws, as we used to have, because of the Second Amendment. This is an interesting argument, because the Second Amendment hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the lineup of conservative justices who read the Constitution, and their intention of finding in it everything they want to find, just as they used to accuse liberal justices of doing. The difference is that what the new justices are finding runs counter to common sense, common understanding and what the actual majority of voters actually wants. And as often as not, these new judicial fantasies also run counter to the vision of the founders who wrote the Constitution.
Now, in addition to a historically recent and crazily absolutist reading of the Second Amendment (disallowing any operative meaning to the “well-organized militia” part), the Supreme Court will take up gerrymandering again. So far justices have been inclined to pretend that consent of the governed and equal protection have no judicial weight in protecting, you know, the consent of the governed and equal protection. Their hands are tied, across their eyes, making it just too complicated for them to see the obvious.
And underlying these distortions is yet a more fundamental one. Somehow the court, in its aggressive lack of wisdom, has been ruling that the sluice-gates of money pouring into the political process must be opened fully. We are now at the point where kids’ math class is devoted to calculating exactly how much each of their lives is worth under this brave new campaign accounting system. Because according to the court, money is speech. This, of course, makes sense when you are operating from a playbook that also says corporations are people. And with the resulting imbalance in political power, how far can we be from a ruling that ONLY corporations are people? Or has that in effect already been decided?
More from Tom Toles:
John Bolton wants to make his mark
The case against gatekeepers is that they didn’t keep the gate
The week by Tom Toles: A gift to big banks, Mueller’s bodyguards and Trump’s #YouToo moment
