Some Reasons Why The Left Hates Judge Kavanaugh

[Charlie T Waite]

He is a textualist and originalist in the mold of the Supreme Court’s other Second Amendment stalwarts, including the late Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas. Judge Kavanaugh provided a staunch defense of the right to keep and bear arms in a case that concerned the constitutionality of the gun control regime D.C. enacted in the wake of the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision. 

Dissenting from an opinion that upheld most aspects of the District’s intentionally oppressive regulations, Kavanaugh wrote: “As a lower court … it is not our role to re-litigate Heller or to bend it in any particular direction. Our sole job is to faithfully apply Heller and the approach it set forth for analyzing gun bans and regulations.” Applying the methodology set forth in Justice Scalia’s carefully-written but often-ignored opinion, Kavanaugh concluded, “In my judgment, both D.C.'s ban on semi-automatic rifles and its gun registration requirement are unconstitutional under Heller.”  

Needless to say, this – plus his refusal to “bend” precedent to suit the personal politics of progressive “reformers” – have made Judge Kavanaugh a target of anti-gun members of the Senate. Chief among them is the Judiciary’s Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). 

Feinstein humiliated herself at Judge Kavanaugh’s earlier confirmation hearings by misrepresenting the federal “assault weapons” ban of which she claimed authorship. She also ludicrously suggested that the same types of firearms owned by millions upon millions of law-abiding Americans are not “in common use” for purposes of analyzing whether they are among the “arms” protected by the Second Amendment.