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President's Column | Barack Obama’s Lifetime Appointment

Friday, April 1, 2016

President's Column | Barack Obama’s Lifetime Appointment

“Wow! What a great idea. Nobody has ever suggested that to me. I love that. Wow. I tell you, that’s a great idea. … He’s brilliant. He can set forth an argument, and he was a law professor. He has all the credentials.”  

That was Hillary Clinton’s gushy answer to a planted question during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in January where she was asked that if she were elected president, would she nominate President Barack Obama to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

I cannot envision a more ominous threat from a presidential candidate when it comes to the future of American liberty. 
“The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment.” 
— Hillary Clinton

Imagine Obama—from the vantage of a lifetime appointment on the highest court of the land—using his ideological wrecking ball to continue to “fundamentally transform the USA.”

In expanding her answer, Hillary said, “It is true that the next president may get from one to three Supreme Court appointments. I think the Supreme Court has really, unfortunately, been headed in the wrong direction.” 

During a private, closed-door fundraiser that occurred earlier, Hillary defined the direction she would have the court take: “The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment.” 

Let me define that: She means “wrong” when, by a one-vote margin, the court in 2008 found the Second Amendment to be an individual right, striking down the District of Columbia’s gun ban. And she means “wrong” when, also by one vote, a similar Chicago ban was voided in 2010 as violating the Second Amendment, thus extending the right to every corner of the nation. 

Like Obama, Hillary coyly claims to embrace the Second Amendment, but their version of what it means has nothing to do with the intent of the Founding Fathers. In Hillary and Obama’s Second Amendment, no infringement goes too far. 

To that end, Hillary and Obama have enthusiastically embraced the massive 1990s Australian scheme that saw the confiscation and destruction of registered semi-automatic shotguns, pump-action shotguns and semi-automatic rifles from licensed owners. 

In a redux of that destruction of long guns, whole classes of registered handguns were taken from licensed owners. As a result, nearly a million firearms belonging to peaceable Australians were “melted down into soup cans and bus stop benches.” 

Hillary’s rehearsed answer to that scripted town hall question about a possible “Justice Obama” was a setup to plant a political seed. 

This whole question about “Justice Obama” has been creeping into the mainstream media for some time with a series of pundits and academics touting the idea.

Hillary, for her part, totally understands that shaping the Supreme Court is key to permanently changing the direction of the nation. 

In a January 2016 Boston Globe op-ed headlined, “A make-or-break moment for Supreme Court appointments,” Hillary warned: “The stakes are clear. In a single term, conservative justices could undermine virtually every pillar of the progressive movement. Imagine what they will do in the future if the court becomes even more conservative.” 
We all must work as never before to win the White House with a pro-Second Amendment president, and we must maintain the pro-freedom majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

I can imagine that very easily. Her personal nightmare of toppled progressive pillars is our dream of freedoms preserved. With a conservative court saved and expanded, the Second Amendment would be secure for our children and their children. The First Amendment would be, as well.

Would Obama accept a Hillary nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court? I would wager that once out of office, then-former President Obama will desperately miss wielding immense power.

Further, I suspect that Obama’s colossal, all-smothering ego would welcome the offer if President Hillary Clinton—or President Bernie Sanders or President Joe Biden—were to make it.

Obama’s sense of hubris runs his life. He once bragged to a key staffer, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. ... I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Surely Obama believes he would be a better justice than anyone who ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Could he be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, though? 

Hillary had an answer for that one, too: “You know, we do have to get a Democratic Senate to get him confirmed.” 

Those threats should motivate every freedom-loving voter we know in the months leading up to the November elections. But we must reach them with our message of freedom one by one.

We all must work as never before to win the White House with a pro-Second Amendment president, and we must maintain the pro-freedom majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

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Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the "lobbying" arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.