Today in Supreme Court History: September 26, 1986

9/26/1986: Chief Justice Warren Burger resigns.

Chief Justice Warren Burger

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

The individual rights view of the Second Amendment not only erases the Militia Clause but, as Burger said, really is a fraud perpetrated by the gun manufacturers and caters to male insecurity. While allowing world-record rates of gun violence, here and abroad where our guns are re-sold.

[DaivdBehar]

Cap. I always request the denominator. Today, 65 million owners of 300 million guns got through without incident. Gun dense places like Israel and Switzerland have low rates of violence and of suicide using guns. Look elsewhere for the causes of violence, like at the bastardy rate.

[DaivdBehar]

Burger illustrated the acculturation to DC effect, and the necessity of moving the Supreme Court to the middle of the country. Conservative jurist led his Court to Roe v. Wade, and he was not a dissenter.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Cruikshank says otherwise…it just has nothing to do with the 2A.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

The Bill of Rights is individual rights. The founders' and framers' writing make it clear they were thinking of the individual right to keep and bear arms as a means of self-defense, against critters, humans, and especially government.

Any other reading is wishful statist thinking.

The only citations any such statist can make are all to modern statists.

[Bob from Ohio]

"The Bill of Rights is individual rights."

All rights in all amendments are individual, except for this one collective one. Amazingly, its the one right libs hate.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Liberals never had a problem with the collective rights view. They never "hated" it.

[Bob from Ohio]

A collective right is no right at all.

You hate gun rights. Its ok. Admit it. We all know.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Militias were necessary to the security of the state. They don’t exist any more. The 2A is an anachronism as surely as is the 3A.

[Michael P]

Huh. So your plan is first to disarm your opponents, and then quarter soldiers in their houses. How very China-in-Xinjiang of you.

[Bob from Ohio]

"as Burger said"

Liberals think the wisest people are dead Republicans.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Few dead Republicans would get admitted into today's Republican Party. They'd be considered too left-wing and (worst of all) refuse to march in lockstep with Trump's latest juvenile tantrum.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Few dead Republicans would get admitted into today’s Republican Party."

Good, they were mostly losers, they didn't conserve much.

[Michael P]

Democrats from 20 years ago are far too conservative for today's Democrat party. For one thing, they knew that marriage is a union of one man and one woman.

[AmosArch]

I too wish we could go back to the superprogressive times of 50s era Republicans and their whole hearted embrace of gender neutral bathrooms, safe spaces, and critical race theory.

lol are you 'everything is more conservative now unlike the good old days' guys even aware how delusional you sound?

[David Nieporent]

The individual rights view of the Second Amendment not only erases the Militia Clause but, as Burger said, really is a fraud perpetrated by the gun manufacturers

So you think Lawrence Tribe was tricked by Smith & Wesson into acknowledging the validity of the individual rights interpretation? And Akhil Reed Amar and Sandy Levinson?

[Dan Schiavetta]

I don’t know their motivations. Tribe, we know, can play a double game, like with the flag burning case.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Can I has cheeseburger?

[Cal Cetín]

He looks like an actor who plays a Chief Justice on TV.

[Dan Schiavetta]

To be truthful, this resembles the criticism people had of him. He used pomade to whiten his hair and even was thinking of growing an Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. mustache. An intellectual leader he was not.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Three generations of conservative Republican chief justices are enough.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Good point. The last Chief Justice appointed by a Democrat was Vinson, who died in 1953. 68 years ago.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The reckoning approaches.

FBI director. Fed chair. Supreme Court.

Republicans had their fun. Their time is up.