Ninth Circuit Experiences Brief Spasm of Lucidity

I always tell people they’re…misguided…when they don’t realize it’s impossible to vote for an individual in a presidential election. People say dumb things like, “I vote for the man, not the party.” They don’t understand that a president isn’t just a man. He is also part of a team, and when you vote for the captain of the other team, you gut everyone on your own team. Conservatives who voted for Hillary Clinton or who refused to vote at all weren’t just attacking Donald Trump. They were attacking every conservative politician in America.

One of the president’s most important jobs is to appoint federal judges. These people are very dangerous. They are accountable to no one, and they rule for life. I say “rule” because that’s accurate. They decide what the law means. If a federal judge says a law against arson actually bans cheating at tiddlywinks, that’s what it means, until another judge overrules him. The text of a law means nothing until a judge tells us what it means.

We have a bunch of federal circuits. Each circuit is composed of areas from several states. Some circuit panels are more sane than others. The worst circuit in the US is the Ninth Circuit, which rules over California, Hawaii, and some other western states. They are completely unhinged. They routinely agree with far-left eccentrics, and their decisions can be very damaging.

This week, the Ninth Circuit did a shocking thing. An appellate panel changed the law in Hawaii, and the ruling applies to all other Ninth Circuit states. The court held that OPEN carry of weapons was protected by the US Constitution. Not concealed, mind you. They say regulating concealed carry may be okay. They decided to protect OPEN carry. We don’t even have that in Florida, which has a reputation for loose gun laws.

Believe it or not, Hawaii and California were already open-carry states. In Hawaii, you could carry openly with a carry permit. The problem was that carry permits were impossible to get. The new case makes it much easier to get permits.

Prior to the decision, Hawaiians were not allowed to have weapons in their vehicles. It was open season on people in cars. Can you believe that? Now they can walk down the street with holsters on their hips.

The opinion is startling. In its lengthy endorsement of the famous Heller case, it firmly, decisively rejects the “militia” connection liberals have tried to tack onto the Second Amendment. All cases holding that 2A doesn’t apply to individuals are now bad law in the Ninth Circuit. They were already bad law because of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, but now the Ninth has expressly adopted Heller just about as hard as possible. Courts can play games with rulings from higher courts. They can deliberately misconstrue and delay. “Sorry; your transmission was garbled.” This new case is an unconditional surrender.

The opinion also defines the phrase “keep and bear” very clearly. As I have often said, and as some courts have said, “keep and bear” means “own and carry.” This is obvious to anyone who owns a dictionary, but liberals dispute it. The Ninth Circuit now says its subjects are allowed to carry outside their homes. It points out that the right to carry means nothing if it doesn’t apply outside the home. The founding fathers didn’t include the word “bear” so you could carry your rifle in circles in your living room.

The most satisfying part of the case is a long passage in which the court compares deprivation of the right to carry with Reconstruction-era confiscation of firearms from freed slaves! You really have to read it to believe it. Leftists want us to forget something very important: the right to own and carry arms is a CIVIL right, and people who support 2A are civil rights activists.

It’s interesting to look at the history of the case.

The suit was filed by a man named Young. He was upset because Hawaii did not like issuing permits. Hawaii would only give permits to people who were special. Security guards were able to get permits. Magnum, P.I. was able to get a permit. Probably Higgins, too, because of his MI6 connections. Maybe Don Ho. People who showed extraordinary, urgent need could (supposedly but probably not really) get permits. Mr. Young sued the state and his county.

The lower court judge is named Helen Gillmor. See if you can guess who appointed her. I’ll tell you: Bill Clinton, husband of the unelected woman who anointed herself healthcare empress. Gillmor is an undistinguished lawyer who went to school in New York and Boston. She is a former PD, which speaks volumes. PD’s are delusional in their hatred of everything good. Perhaps I exaggerate, but the job attracts real kooks.

Gillmor made some crazy rulings. She appears to have had no respect for Mr. Young’s pro se lawsuit, so she did some frivolous things in order to turf his case into a black hole, surely hoping the Ninth Circuit would back her up. For one thing, she denied that 2A granted rights to individuals. That’s not even close to what the case law says.

The appellate judges who fixed things were named Ikuta and…some Gaelic name I’m not going to go back and look up. One is a Bush II appointee, and the other is a Reagan appointee. The third judge dissented. Bush II appointed him. Oh, well.

Why talk about the judges? Because their history is more important than the law. Their biases determined what they ultimately decided. Clinton’s girl bent over backwards to distort the law to suit her frustrated wishes, and two judges appointed by Republicans straightened things out.

If you didn’t vote for Trump, you voted against your 2A rights. Even if you stayed home, you helped activist judges who don’t mind if their actions give criminals the power to kill or rape you at will. You should be ashamed of your ignorance, your childishness, or both.

One of the most beautiful things about Trump’s victory is his work to appoint conservative judges. Obama appointed all sorts of crazies. Now Trump is working to dilute the cesspool. He can’t fire the nuts, but he can fill spots with people who will fight them. That’s very important.

We’re about to see Kavanaugh seated on the Supreme Court. No one can predict what a justice will do once he has no one to answer to (Reagan appointed Kennedy), but more likely than not, Kavanaugh will be very helpful to us. Ruth Ginsburg is in bad health, and Clarence Thomas is getting old. We may have a chance to get rid of a socialist who has said she wants to repeal 2A, and we may be able to replace a faithful servant with someone younger. This is a very big deal. But the never-Trumpers don’t get that. They would rather be petty and watch their rights disappear so they can tell the rest of us they told us so.

The never-Trump plan is not working out well. The economy is strong. Trump is doing a lot of great things. He needs our help, because he runs again in two years, and the alternative will be someone like fake Indian Liz Warren or Kamala Harris. I wonder how long the pouters will sit on the sidelines and pray for Trump to fail. The more he succeeds, the dumber they look.

Enemies are bad. Treacherous friends are worse. That’s why armies have traditionally fed and sheltered POW’s while hanging spies. The GOP has a lot of spies right now.

I completely understand that Trump rubs people the wrong way, and that he is disappointing on a personal level, but that doesn’t justify turning on the rest of us.

I have never seen a candidate I supported in the primaries win a presidential election, but that didn’t drive me to sit in a corner and suck my thumb. I held my nose and voted for McCain and Romney. I preferred Cruz to Trump, but I voted for Trump in the end. You have to buy off the rack. You can’t always have the candidate you want. It’s important to grow up and do what you can.

The Hawaii case shows what can happen if we keep Republicans in the White House. Why are so many of us working against that?

I don’t know why I write about this stuff. In reality, prayer and repentance are what matter. If people are voting stupidly, it’s because we have turned away from God and opened ourselves to deception. If we don’t turn back to God, all the conservative policy in the world won’t help us. Still, it’s nice to see America’s decline retarded.