&#8220;I&#8217;ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.” – President Ronald Reagan
Today is the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-at-march-for-life-we-are-fighting-for-those-who-have-no-voice-and-we-will-win">47th March for Life</a> in Washington, D.C. For nearly five decades, dating back to the one-year anniversary of the abominable Roe v. Wade decree, Americans from all walks of life have braved the January cold to march together in solidarity with the most vulnerable subset of the human population: The unborn. It is a remarkable display of unity in defiance of a grave injustice that stains our collective national conscience.
Roe, of course, is just as morally abhorrent as it is constitutionally fabricated. As I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-hammer-on-tipping-point-with-liz-wheeler-the-legal-argument-to-overturn-roe">explained</a> earlier this week on Liz Wheeler&#8217;s One America News program, there is nothing whatsoever in the original public meaning or plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause — which states, &#8220;nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law&#8221; — that transmogrifies the inherently elitist U.S. Supreme Court into an institution that can unilaterally impose abortion policy upon a nation as diverse as ours. As U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-judge-william-pryor-is-yet-again-a-victim-of-the-lefts-war-on-truth">said</a> at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Roe is &#8220;unsupported by the text and structure of the Constitution, [and] it has [also] led to a morally wrong result. It has led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children.&#8221;
But don&#8217;t take it from just avowed pro-lifers; iconic leftist Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has even <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/the-forgotten-history-of-justice-ginsburgs-criticism-of-roe-v-wade/2016/03/01/9ba0ea2e-dfe8-11e5-9c36-e1902f6b6571_story.html">opined</a> that Roe was incorrect, as a matter of law. Ditto famously liberal longtime Harvard Law School professor John Hart Ely, who <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122704335139038479">once said</a> that Roe &#8220;is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.&#8221;
The fight for the unborn is the human rights struggle of our time. The <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1220797862017191943">comparisons</a> to antebellum chattel slavery are <a href="https://www.redstate.com/erick/2015/10/26/yes-the-arguments-for-abortion-do-parallel-the-arguments-defending-slavery/">remarkable</a>: Both involve treating fellow human beings as property to be harmed at will, both were upheld by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds via the Fifth/Fourteenth Amendment <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/five-lessons-abraham-lincoln-would-have-todays-josh-hammer">doctrinal ruse</a> known as &#8220;substantive due process,&#8221; both are deemed <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">beyond reproach</a> by <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1260996">judicial supremacists</a>, and the opposition to each is led by the Republican Party. As iconic conservative Princeton University professor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-iconic-conservative-leader-requests-ag-barr-address-pornography">Robert P. George</a> co-wrote in 2004 <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/08/republicans-and-relics-barbarism-robert-p-george-william-l-saunders/">at National Review</a>: &#8220;For the Republicans&#8221; of the Civil War era, &#8220;the idea that human beings could be reduced to the status of mere &#8216;objects&#8217; to be bought and sold and exploited for the benefit of others was a profound violation of the intrinsic dignity of creatures made in the image and likeness of God.&#8221; Abortion is similarly a &#8220;profound violation of the intrinsic dignity of creatures made in the image and likeness of God.&#8221; &#8221;
The reality is that the conservative movement, and the Republican Party with which it is intertwined, simply must come to view Roe and its murderous progeny as indistinguishable from the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 that directly precipitated the Civil War. &#8220;As with Roe, the Dred Scott decision lacked any warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution,&#8221; Dr. George wrote four years ago at <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/01/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it">First Things</a>. &#8220;It was, as Abraham Lincoln rightly insisted, an act of judicial will, not law, and as such an assault on the very Constitution in whose name the justices purported to act. Dred Scott, like Roe v. Wade, was a case of judicial usurpation in the cause of mass dehumanization.&#8221;
It is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-president-trump-will-be-the-first-president-to-attend-the-march-for-life-heres-why-that-matters">wonderful</a> that President Donald Trump spoke today to the March for Life. But to oppose abortion yet support judicial supremacy — the notion that the Supreme Court does not merely render judgments for discrete litigants in a given <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii">Article III</a> &#8220;case&#8221; or &#8220;controversy,&#8221; but is the exclusive and final arbiter of broader legal/political principle for the nation — is not to oppose abortion at all. It is self-contradictory and nonsensical. President Trump would do well to<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer"> follow the lead</a> of his predecessor Abraham Lincoln, who issued the following famous remarks as part of his magisterial <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp">First Inaugural Address</a> (emphasis my own):
<blockquote>I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.</blockquote>
Roe is not merely a human rights tragedy of unfathomable scale. It is also a bastardization of our entire system of self-governance. It is a bastardization of the republicanism upon which the nation was founded. And it deserves to be treated with no more dignity than the righteous irreverence with which Lincoln treated Dred Scott.

Demonstrators Participate In The March For Life Pro-Life Rally

HAMMER: Abortion Is A Grave Injustice. We Must Treat Roe Just Like Dred Scott.

Abortion

Constitution

Fourteenth Amendment

March For Life

Morality

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Supreme Court

Roe v. Wade is the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jacobs-why-the-u-s-supreme-court-needs-to-recognize-fetal-rights">essence of science denial</a>, and it has been for nearly 50 years. Yet the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates share a vision of America that centers around Roe and its long-debunked scientific notions about human biology.
Ever since the first Democratic presidential debates, the candidates have increasingly asserted their fervent belief in Roe v. Wade — a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-yes-alabama-legislature-right-openly-defy-josh-hammer">fallacious decision</a> that is based upon and perpetuates erroneous and obsolete ideas that contradict the fundamental, objective scientific facts of the biological science of human embryology. The most egregious, blatant, and disingenuous of all Roe&#8216;s distortions is its central tenet that it remains a mystery when human life begins.
More, in order to completely obscure the biological truth and redefine human reproduction to satisfy their political point of view, the politicians have announced numerous policies to augment Roe, including the promise to codify this toxic source of misinformation about human development.
Roe v. Wade declares: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man&#8217;s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”
Since when should those in “medicine, philosophy, and theology” be consulted for such a specifically biological issue when they have no such academic expertise? Most philosophers and theologians have never had a graduate course in biology, much less in human embryology, and most physicians briefly learn about human embryology as part of a broader anatomy course and are not properly considered “scientists.” Human embryology is the study of development of the new individual from beginning to end and is the only science that specializes in when a human life starts; solely the testimonies of those biologists with doctoral degrees in human embryology should, in theory, be consulted. Yet not one human embryologist was allowed to testify during the Roe litigation.
In addition, to help rationalize the decision to reject the concept of “personhood” of the human embryo and fetus until “viability,” cited at the time to be between 24 and 28 weeks, Roe refers to ancient scientific ideas about human reproduction when it claims: “There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth. This was the belief of the Stoics.”
The Stoics were a group of Greek philosophers, existing around 300 B.C.E. Are the Democratic presidential candidates endorsing the suggestion that human biology has not advanced for more than 2000 years — and that it will never do so?
Among the scientific experts, there is and has long been an international consensus regarding the beginning of a human life. When a human being — an individual, living member of the human species — begins to exist has been known and documented for more than 100 years and was instituted in 1942 in the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development. The Carnegie Stages continue to be refined and advanced as the global standard of human embryological research, and <a href="https://www.medicalmuseum.mil/assets/documents/collections/hdac/stage01.pdf">Carnegie Stage 1</a> still documents human sexual reproduction.
Carnegie Stage 1 states that all sexually reproduced human beings begin to exist at the start of the process of fertilization (Carnegie Stage 1a). Human embryologists know that fertilization also initiates the continuum of human life — in other words, after fertilization, the new human being does not become a different kind of thing. He or she continues to grow and develop as the same human organism throughout the rest of the embryonic period, the fetal period, and then after birth, during the subsequent stages of life.
Thus, the term “human embryo” or “human fetus” is simply the scientific name for an already-existing human being during the embryonic or fetal period of human development. Thus, for sexually reproduced human beings, &#8220;personhood&#8221; begins at fertilization, not at “viability,” “first breath,” or some later point that conveniently fits a popular political, social, or economic narrative.
Under the Supreme Court’s current abortion jurisprudence precedent, as established in Roe v. Wade and modified/upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states are still prohibited from applying the objective scientific facts and banning abortion prior to “viability.” However, as medical technology has improved, Roe’s fetal “viability” threshold has moved back from 28 weeks — not forward to 40 weeks as imagined by the Democratic presidential hopefuls. In the U.S., infants born at 22 weeks gestation have a nearly 25% survival rate and in Japan, the survival rate is over 30%. In Sweden, for infants younger than 22 weeks gestation, the survival rate has improved from 3.6% to 20% over the last decade.
Rather than pledging allegiance to, expanding upon, and imposing their misconceptions and Roe v. Wade’s absurd “scientific” myths on the American people, the Democratic presidential candidates should acknowledge that the immediate product of human sexual reproduction is both a human being and a human person — and renounce public policies and laws that do not reflect this scientific reality.
&nbsp;
Brooke Stanton is the CEO of Contend Projects, a registered 501(c)(3) education organization spreading the basic, accurate scientific facts about when a human life starts and the biological science of human embryology.

Embryo at 7 weeks

STANTON: The Pro-Abortion Democrats And Their Unscientific Roe-volution

Last evening, on the 47th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court&#8217;s <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/roe-v-wade-ed-whelan/">infamous</a> Roe v. Wade decision, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who has been a frequent proponent of both the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-what-alyssa-milano-gets-so-very-wrong-about-josh-hammer">immorality of abortion</a> and the need to overturn or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-yes-alabama-legislature-right-openly-defy-josh-hammer">openly &#8220;defy&#8221;</a> a decision as patently erroneous as Roe, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HnMAHs3-c">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to make the straightforward constitutional argument for why Roe was indeed wrongly decided.
Hammer, a <a href="https://fedsoc.org/contributors/josh-hammer">Federalist Society campus speaker</a> who has a forthcoming piece of legal scholarship on the issue of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">judicial supremacy</a>, argued in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> one year ago that President Donald Trump would be on firm legal standing to outright &#8220;defy&#8221; lawless edicts such as Roe. Hammer contrasted the language of the little-known 1958 case of Cooper v. Aaron — in which the Court pronounced its judicial supremacist adherence to &#8220;the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution&#8221; — with the language from Abraham Lincoln’s <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp">First Inaugural Address</a>, in which Lincoln disavowed the legal and moral abomination of Dred Scott v. Sandford as a broader binding political principle:
<blockquote>I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.</blockquote>
For many social conservatives and constitutional originalists, Roe is the direct <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/02/lincoln-on-judicial-despotism">legal and moral successor</a> to Dred Scott — and <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/01/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it">ought to be treated</a> as such.
But before getting there, Hammer explained to Wheeler the basic 14th Amendment argument as to why Roe is, in fact, a wrongly decided decision whose unprecedented nationalization of abortion policy under thin constitutional guise amounted to a horrific judicial power grab:
<blockquote>Let&#8217;s talk about the actual constitutional law here. The 14th Amendment, Section 1 — it was a very famous constitutional amendment ratified in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War, intended as a civil rights provision largely for free blacks. The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment says that &#8220;nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.&#8221; By the Due Process Clause&#8217;s plain text, it refers only to process — it does not refer to what lawyers would call &#8220;substance.&#8221;
Nonetheless, in 1965, in a case called Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found that due to the &#8220;penumbras&#8221; and the &#8220;emanations&#8221; that come from the Fourth, Ninth, and 14th Amendments, there is a &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; in the Constitution. That is nonsense: There&#8217;s no such thing as a &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; anywhere whatsoever in the constitutional text. But from there, it was a pretty short step, eight years later after Griswold in 1973, for the Court to say that this &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; that they found means that you have a constitutional right to abort your unborn born child.
And it is a complete distortion and bastardization of the 14th Amendment. In my opinion, Roe v. Wade, Liz, is one of the two most constitutionally unsound and horrific decisions probably probably ever promulgated by the Supreme Court. &#8230; [It&#8217;s] right up there with the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which my hero of all heroes, Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address in 1861, famously said that he would not abide by. He respected it as applied to Dred Scott himself, but would not respect the ruling as it applied to anyone else in the country. And for years now, I&#8217;ve been preaching my [fellow] conservatives to adapt and adopt that principle as it applies to Roe itself.</blockquote>
WATCH:
<iframe title="The Legal Argument to Overturn Roe v. Wade" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lBMCT8peHGE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hammer OANN 1.22.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: The Legal Argument To Overturn Roe

Judicial Branch

Judiciary

For the first time in recent memory following a horrific mass shooting, there appears to be an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50321/republicans-move-take-most-significant-gun-control-james-barrett">emerging consensus</a> of many elected Republicans and outside conservative voices that &#8220;something&#8221; must finally be done on the issue of guns. In particular, many Republicans seem eager to consider the state-level adoption and implementation of so-called &#8220;red flag&#8221; laws — otherwise known as <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/gun-control-republicans-consider-gvro/">&#8220;gun violence restraining orders&#8221;</a> (GVROs). The popularity of &#8220;red flag&#8221; laws seemed to increase after National Review&#8217;s David French <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/gun-control-republicans-consider-gvro/">endorsed</a> them in the aftermath of the 2018 Parkland shooting, and President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/donald-trump-is-right-to-call-for-red-flag-laws/">endorsed</a> them this week in the aftermath of last weekend&#8217;s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.
While specific &#8220;red flag&#8221; laws will vary in their precise statutory wording, French <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/gun-control-republicans-consider-gvro/">summarized</a> the basic statutory framework in his post-Parkland endorsement: &#8220;[B]roadly speaking, [&#8216;red flag&#8217; laws] permit a spouse, parent, sibling, or person living with a troubled individual to petition a court for an order enabling law enforcement to temporarily take that individual’s guns right away.&#8221; The basic concept of the GVRO may be fairly analogized to that of a restraining order, in the context of family law.
GVROs are certainly well-intentioned. Indeed, more so than merely being well-intentioned, they would likely have a greater impact on curtailing gun violence committed by mentally twisted and deranged individuals than would, for example, grotesquely over-inclusive and illogical <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50263/hammer-conservatives-must-not-go-soft-assault-josh-hammer">calls to ban entire new sub-classes</a> of semiautomatic weaponry. Conservatives of different stripes can, and will, disagree on the prudential trade-offs and judgment calls involved with assessing a specific proposed GVRO&#8217;s policy meritoriousness.
But at minimum, conservatives should be very, very skeptical of &#8220;red flag&#8221; laws.
Many &#8220;red flag&#8221; law supporters twist themselves into knots to explain how purportedly &#8220;well crafted&#8221; GVROs can comport with rudimentary, fundamental principles of due process. French, in particular, has <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/donald-trump-is-right-to-call-for-red-flag-laws/">carefully prescribed</a> five criteria that he would seek to implement in a &#8220;properly drafted&#8221; GVRO. But even accepting the premise of a &#8220;properly drafted&#8221; GVRO law, there is simply no escaping the reality that the entire GVRO procedure flips due process on its head where a core <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf">constitutional right</a> is at stake. As Dana Loesch aptly <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/06/red-flag-laws-not-good-solution-mass-shootings/">put it</a> at The Federalist this week, &#8220;it is an abrogation of due process to invert the order of &#8216;innocent until proven guilty&#8217; to &#8216;somewhat guilty until proven innocent.'&#8221; GVRO advocates argue that the burden of proof must still fall on the party petitioning to confiscate the respondent&#8217;s firearms — but the procedural reality is that the petitioner is still the first mover and, after that initial move, the onus shifts to the respondent to demonstrate his innocence. That is hardly an exemplary means by which to dispense with a cherished constitutional liberty, and it is made even more egregious in the context of &#8220;emergency&#8221; ex parte (i.e., one-party) proceedings — which GVRO advocates <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/donald-trump-is-right-to-call-for-red-flag-laws/">concede</a> will be a reality.
It is worth breaking down the due process point a bit further, as I did in a <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1159101506920034305">tweet thread</a> yesterday. Like many conservatives, I take a <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1159102556540481536">very narrow view</a> of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment. In accordance with what Justice Clarence Thomas has called the <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1159102556540481536">&#8220;law-of-the-land view&#8221;</a> of the Due Process Clause, my belief is that the constitutional requirement for due process merely &#8220;requires &#8230; that our Government &#8230; proceed &#8230; according to written constitu­tional and statutory provision[s] before depriving someone of life, liberty, or property&#8221; (as Justice Thomas phrased it in his dissent in the 2017 case of <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1256_5i36.pdf">Nelson v. Colorado</a>). Under this narrow view of constitutional due process, GVROs are fine.
But in our constitutional republic, black-letter legal exegesis is affirmatively not the only purpose that the Constitution serves. Consider this 2014 Yuval Levin <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-our-democracy-works-yuval-levin/">piece</a> at National Review, in which Levin cited University of Virginia&#8217;s James Ceaser for the proposition that there are two distinct senses in which the Constitution must be understood:
<blockquote>The first sense — legalistic constitutionalism — understands the Constitution as a set of rules that can decide policies or cases; these rules are of a sort that can offer definitive answers and that could be employed and enforced by courts. The second sense — political constitutionalism — understands the Constitution as a document that fixes certain ends of government activity, delineates a structure and arrangement of powers, and encourages a certain tone to the operation of the institutions. By this understanding, it falls mostly to political actors making political decisions to protect and promote constitutional goals.</blockquote>
I believe &#8220;red flag&#8221; laws pretty clearly fail the &#8220;political constitutionalism&#8221; conception of what due process entails for a societally cherished and constitutionally enumerated individual right. The Framers would have been positively aghast at the notion that a next-door neighbor or workplace supervisor could successfully petition a court to deprive an individual of his Second Amendment rights — let alone in ex parte, secretive fashion — for <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/06/red-flag-laws-not-good-solution-mass-shootings/">up to two weeks</a> before a gun owner may attempt to defend himself. To many, that may seem awfully reminiscent of the old English Star Chamber. And even more horrifyingly Orwellian is the on-the-ground reality that people have <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/11/06/maryland-police-officer-shoots-kills-man-being-served-with-gun-grab-order-under-new-red-flag-law">already died at the hands of law enforcement</a> after they have been unwilling to turn in their GVRO-stripped firearms.
Is this really the world that conservatives — especially those of a smaller government hue — wish to live in? How about this great question that Loesch <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/06/red-flag-laws-not-good-solution-mass-shootings/">asks</a>: &#8220;Will any considerations be given to women defending themselves against domestic abusers who might misuse the system to render their victims defenseless?&#8221; Where are the feminists here — don&#8217;t GVROs disproportionately harm women, who are generally physically weaker than male counterparts and therefore more reliant on weaponry for self-defense? What about the notion that we will never be able to come even remotely close of ridding the system of false positives, as Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz incisively <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-yellow-light-for-red-flag-laws-11565132144">points out</a> at The Wall Street Journal? &#8220;How many law-abiding people are we prepared to deprive of guns to prevent even one mass shooting?&#8221; Dershowitz asks. It&#8217;s a very good question.
And yet there is one even more basic objection to &#8220;red flag&#8221; laws. Conservatives must think about who will be tasked with actually adjudicating and enforcing GVROs: Courts. In what world, with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42341/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">judicial #Resistance run amok</a> across the nation and a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49913/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">systemically rigged game</a> against conservatives across the entirety of the judiciary, would conservatives be willing to play this game? The potential for abuse here is astounding. In blue states especially, but also in many red states, anti-gun fanatics populate large swaths of the judiciary. These black-robed oracles will oftentimes be massively incentivized to grant very weak petitioners the GVROs they seek, due mostly to an innately held animus against gun rights. What kind of far-left blue state judge would be willing to resist a sob story from a crazy girlfriend or an aggrieved workplace supervisor?
Gun owners tend to be cynical folks. I know because I am one. And GVROs will simply not end well for us gun owners — all of us, not just the crazy folks who should indeed not possess firearms.
If Republicans and conservatives feel the need to &#8220;do something&#8221; after El Paso and Dayton, they certainly have options. Why not start with national right-to-carry reciprocity legislation, which is <a href="http://www.stevesachs.com/HR38_SachsBarnettBaudeLtr_20170323.pdf">clearly constitutional</a> under Article IV of the Constitution?
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Why is the new GOP policy talking point not right-to-carry national reciprocity legislation (clearly constitutional under Art. IV Full Faith and Credit Clause) instead of constitutionally questionable “red flag” legislation?
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1159167792182104064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 7, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Maybe somewhere out there, a Republican elected official is listening. But probably not.

HAMMER: Conservatives Should Be Very Skeptical Of ‘Red Flag’ Laws

Donald Trump

Gun Buybacks

Gun Control

Gun Laws

Guns

Second Amendment

On Tuesday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer — who is also a constitutional attorney specializing in religious liberty — <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgB0ycTAbYI">joined</a> &#8220;Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler&#8221; on One America News Network (OANN) to discuss a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49234/hammer-here-legal-reason-why-trump-must-ask-about-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> he had written earlier this week about the legal fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court&#8217;s census citizenship question decision in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/department-of-commerce-v-new-york/">Department of Commerce v. New York</a>.
In Department of Commerce, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court&#8217;s liberal bloc to temporarily enjoin the Trump administration from including the citizenship question on the census. But as Hammer argued in his op-ed, there appears to be an obscure constitutional rationale, buried in the text of the little-used second <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv">section of the Fourteenth Amendment</a>, that may actually require the president to include the citizenship question on the census.
Here is the the relevant text of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, with emphasis in bolded italics: &#8220;But when the right to vote &#8230; is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.&#8221;
Hammer explained to Wheeler why this textual provision is so important for the Trump administration&#8217;s continuing efforts to include the citizenship question on the census.
<blockquote>&#8230; The Fourteenth Amendment is probably the most frequently invoked amendment for constitutional litigation, in general, but probably &#8230; 97% to 98% of that litigation is in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. There are actually five sections. Section 1 involves all the clauses that people are familiar with: It&#8217;s the Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clause — all the clauses that you hear about. &#8230;
But there&#8217;s actually five sections and Section 2 is just as legally effective as Section 1, by definition &#8230; and what Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment very clearly says is that when a state abridges the right to vote for a certain subset of male, 21-year-old citizens, then there&#8217;s a penalty for that. You can&#8217;t do that, and &#8230; the formula for the penalty is that you have reduced representation in Congress from the next census. And the formula for determining that reduced representation is a fraction, where both [numbers] require citizen-by-citizen data. &#8230; Essentially, your representation is reduced by the proportion of who is is denied this right to vote — male 21-year-old citizens [who have their vote abridged] divided by the total number of male 21-year up citizens. &#8230;
[F]rom a very plain English standpoint, &#8230; the Constitution literally says that we need to know if there are 21-year-old male citizens in a state who are having their right to vote abridged, and it is the word &#8220;shall&#8221; that is used. In lawyer world, the word &#8220;shall&#8221; means the same thing that it means in plain English world: It is a direct affirmative mandate. This is not like a wishy-washy m-a-y &#8220;may,&#8221; it is &#8220;shall.&#8221;</blockquote>
From a constitutional perspective, then, &#8220;we literally need to know the number of citizens in each state for possible penalization of a state for abridging the right to vote for its male 21-year-old citizens,&#8221; he continued.
Hammer concluded his thoughts to Wheeler by discussing what the next legal steps for the Trump administration should be. Hammer urged that President Trump issue a straightforward executive order that unilaterally invokes the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment as justifying — indeed, mandating — the inclusion of the citizenship question on the census.
<blockquote>I mean the words are very clear. The word &#8220;shall&#8221; means &#8220;shall&#8221;: It is an affirmative obligation that the federal government have this data. So what Trump should do is actually very straightforward. I hope his lawyers are watching this. All you need to do is issue an executive order literally invoking Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and saying that, &#8220;Pursuant to the constitutional authority vested in me, I, President Donald Trump, hereby require that citizenship data be include in the next census.&#8221; It&#8217;s really that simple.</blockquote>
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WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: Why Trump MUST Ask About Citizenship On The Census

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