Prior to passing his first big hurdle on a 51-49 Senate cloture vote Friday morning, Supreme Court Nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh was once again lambasted by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over his “extreme view on guns.”
Feinstein, ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee who has been widely criticized for using allegations from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in an 11th hour attempt to derail the Kavanaugh nomination, made it clear Friday that the judge’s attitude about the Second Amendment is one reason she will vote against confirmation.
“When I asked Judge Kavanaugh about his views that if a gun is in common use it cannot be regulated,” Sen. Feinstein recalled, “he replied this way, and I quote, ‘There are millions and millions and millions of semiautomatic rifles that are possessed so that seems to fit common use and not be a dangerous and unusual weapon.’”
And then, Feinstein—a perennial anti-gunner who has supported gun bans and other restrictive gun control efforts during her career—stated, “Judge Kavanaugh made up a new standard that had nothing to do with common use but instead relied on whether a gun is widely possessed and owned as determinative as to whether it is subject to any regulation.”
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This raises a question. Does Feinstein think these guns are all owned by collectors who never shoot them? Those guns are in “common use” whether the senator cares to acknowledge that or not.
Friday’s vote was essentially along party lines, with all but one Democrat voting against the cloture motion. Only West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin voted in favor of the motion, while Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted “No,” and that could come back to bite if she runs for re-election in 2022.
Feinstein, during her remarks, lamented that “The United States makes up 4% of the world population, but we own 42% of the world’s guns.” Second Amendment activists might wonder, “What’s wrong with that?”
She was distressed about Kavanaugh’s dissent in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, known as ‘Heller II,” in which he contended that semiautomatic rifles should be afforded the same constitutional protection as semiautomatic pistols.
It was all for naught, as Kavanaugh’s candidacy advanced one more step with a final vote scheduled Saturday. If he joins the high court, Kavanaugh is seen as a solid conservative supporting the Second Amendment, which could ultimately lead to Supreme Court scrutiny of extremist gun control laws in states including California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland, and in Washington if Initiative 1639 is passed by voters next month.
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