Originalism At Its Finest

Today the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision struck down the Washington D.C. ban on handguns in a landmark case. I've read quite a few Supreme Court opinions, but Justice Scalia's majority opinion in todays case might be the best I've ever read (a close second would be his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas). Justice Scalia perfectly dissected the 2nd Amendment by taking each phrase and explaining what it meant when the amendment was adopted. I wasn't going to write about this case but I stubbled over a column by E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and I had to write about it. Dionne's title is "Originalism Goes Out the Window", and he is obviously against the decision, but why is what interests me. Dionne writes "Conservative justices claim that they defer to local authority. Not in this case. They insist that political questions should be decided by elected officials. Not in this case. They argue that they pay careful attention to the precise words of the Constitution. Not in this case." Conservatives do want deferment to local authority in many cases, especially for moral or ambiguous questions which judges are no better then answering then anyone else, but nobody has ever argued that all questions be left to local authority. What if a state legislature banned printing newspapers, would Conservatives simply say "Well, we differ to the state."? No, when a political body violates the Constitution the courts must step in, that's what they're there for. Dionne also writes "Thursday's narrow majority spent the first 54 pages of its decision, written by Scalia, trying to show that even though the framers inserted 13 important words in front of the assertion of a right to bear arms, those words were essentially meaningless. Does that reflect an honest attempt to determine the 'original' intention of the Constitution's framers?" Did he read a different opinion then I did? Justice Scalia spent page after page examining the words in the text, what they meant in 1791, the history of those words, the history of the commentary on those words and what the framers said about them outside the Constitution. It not only reflected an honest attempt to determine the original intention of the Constitution but it could frankly be used as a guide in original intention interpretation. Next Dionne writes "But these pragmatic judgments underestimate how radical this decision is in light of the operating precedents of the last 69 years. The United States and its gun owners have done perfectly well since 1939, when an earlier Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment as implying a collective right to bear arms, but not an individual right." First off you tell the scared citizen of Washington D.C. who knows that if someone breaks into there house they won't be able to defend themselves that they have "done perfectly well". Also the 1939 reference is one of the case of United States v. Miller where the Supreme Court validated a law banning sawed off shotguns. As Justice Scalia pointed out "Miller stands only for the proposition that the Second Amendment right, whatever its nature, extends only to certain types of weapons. It is particularly wrongheaded to read Miller for more than what it said, because the case did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment." E.J. Dionne simply won't face the facts the Constitution does grant an individual the right to bear arms. Since the 2nd amendment refers to "the people" one would conclude that it's granted to an individual, like Justice Scalia said “Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right.” Justice Scalia also points out that "[T]he people,’ refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset." If it only referred to a right of the militia then it would, in 1791, be a right of only white males from ages 18-45. The Court got it right today in their interpretation of the text, and Liberals need to admit it when the text doesn't support there wishes.