Rome was not overrun by the Visigoths – at least, not really. Rome overran itself. The Rome of Augustus and Tiberius would have scoffed in the face of the threat presented by the Gothic Wars. However, the fat, bloated, and divided Rome of the fourth century onward was not even able to manage a passable pretense of the glory days which preceded it. It was a territory which sat on wealth it did not deserve and could not protect because its own decadence had sapped its will.

Fast forward to America in the early 21st century. Although not an “Empire” in the traditional sense of the word, America has shepherded the world through a remarkable period of relative peace for the last half decade, and prevented Western Europe from another period of the Dark Ages under communist totalitarianism. Alas, all is not well and the signs of very serious trouble are unavoidable. Here at home on our streets, a sizeable portion of our citizenry is crying out for a factory of infanticide on every corner. Worse, the leading lights of the only political party ostensibly committed to maintaining America’s greatness are crying out for “truce” with the purveyors of this wickedness so that the urgent business of maintaining current marginal tax rates can be attended to.

The end of this story may be seen from the beginning.

Can it be avoided? Perhaps. Conservatives have preferred to chide the last two administrations with failing to understand the nature of the terrorist enemy; will they continue to blind themselves to the nature of the enemy at home? Will those who would deride the idea of a truce with bin Laden continue to cry out for a truce with the enablers and participants in mass infanticide? The answer to these questions holds the future of our society.

And only we are capable of answering them.

General Electric also has a site, which can be found here, where you can submit your own stories and remembrances about Ronald Reagan and the ways in which he inspired you.

In addition, the NFL will join in tribute with this video which is to be shown prior to the Super Bowl:

-Barack Obama

By now I am sure that you have all seen the video of Planned Parenthood actively participating in the coverup of underage sex slavery. If not, please take a few minutes and do so here:

We were honored to have SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser cover this story yesterday, and I would encourage you all to read her post here. This video, however, was compelling enough that I thought a couple of additional points deserved to be made.

First, it has long been alleged (with substantial proof) that the sort of behavior captured on tape here is widespread in Planned Parenthood clinics. Some of this proof is chronicled here, and we have covered an actual Internet confession of a Planned Parenthood worker who admitted to covering up the sexual abuse of minors at RedState before. It is, however, quite another thing to see on the video where the “pimp” talks about how he might have a lot of 14 year old sex slaves who need abortions and the clinic director reaches into the top drawer of her desk and goes “Oh, no problem, we have a HANDOUT YOU CAN LOOK AT which helpfully outlines what to say for you.” How commonplace does a practice have to be before a company goes to the trouble of printing out a handout that it keeps in convenient locations for distribution?

Second, we in this country like to believe that as a country we take strong stands against both slavery and the sexual abuse of minors. Yet here we have an organization which, by uncontroverted proof, facilitates both. This organization receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax money every year. Our elected officials are doing nothing to stop or police this organization. So the question falls to you, dear citizen: what are you going to have your elected officials do about it?

I will say this: this particular Planned Parenthood clinic is in New Jersey. Despite some carping from some folks who have bitter grapes about the Lonegan loss, I have liked just about every move Chris Christie has made as Governor so far. But if he does not come down like a ton of bricks on this clinic I will a) be shocked and b) cross him off my list of potential candidates for both 2012 and 2016. If he has learned nothing from the mistakes of Tom Ridge, then his judgment must be considered fatally flawed. However, whatever Christie does about this particular clinic, only the most thoroughgoing naif would suggest at this point that the behavior captured in this video was an isolated incident confined to New Jersey. This is a national problem with an organization that must be stopped, for the sake of our society’s legitimacy.

Yesterday, I was forcibly reminded of this when someone sent me this excerpt from the forthcoming book Unplanned, in which former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson explains her conversion from pro-choice activist to pro-life activist, as she watched an abortion being performed live on an ultrasound:

At first, the baby didn’t seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby’s side, and for a quick second I felt relief. Of course, I thought. The fetus doesn’t feel pain. I had reassured countless women of this as I’d been taught by Planned Parenthood. The fetal tissue feels nothing as it is removed. Get a grip, Abby. This is a simple, quick medical procedure. My head was working hard to control my responses, but I couldn’t shake an inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the screen.

The next movement was the sudden jerk of a tiny foot as the baby started kicking, as if it were trying to move away from the probing invader. As the cannula pressed its side, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that it could feel the cannula, and it did not like what it was feeling. And then the doctor’s voice broke through, startling me.

“Beam me up, Scotty,” he said lightheartedly to the nurse. He was telling her to turn on the suction — in an abortion the suction isn’t turned on until the doctor feels he has the cannula in exactly the right place.

I had a sudden urge to yell, “Stop!” To shake the woman and say, “Look at what is happening to your baby! Wake up! Hurry! Stop them!”

But even as I thought those words, I looked at my own hand holding the probe. I was one of “them” performing this act. My eyes shot back to the screen again. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty.

If you are able, I encourage you to read the whole thing. I have to confess to you that I almost was not. The horror that Johnson describes is almost unfathomable, accentuated by the cruelty and insensitivity of the conscienceless monsters cracking jokes as they watched the death of a tiny human unfold live before them.

Perversely, the most shocking aspect of this particular story is its mundanity. It occurs every single day in the United States, over three thousand times a day, and has for almost four decades. The only thing that sets this particular abortion apart is that a person possessed of a conscience and some measure of writing skill happened to be present and witness it on ultrasound. Every day, including today, probably several dozen times during the course of the time it takes you to read this article, this horror is repeated in America and no one is present who cares to chronicle it in a book about the way it changed their life. Tens of millions of times since 1973 this has occurred in this country under the color and protection of law.

As pro-lifers who love our country we face a dilemma – one which has been explored at length here at RedState on a number of occasions. Our best defense to a comparative ethics study between America of the last four decades and famous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (e.g., those under Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin) is that our government has merely allowed this horror to go unchecked, as opposed to actively participating in it. Is this papered-on justification enough to salve our consciences?

For now, it seems that it is.  No modern-day John Brown has arisen and those who preach violence as a means to solve the abortion dilemma are justly universally condemned. We trust,  because our democratic system provides non-violent avenues for solving so many problems and righting even deeply entrenched wrongs, that sooner or later it will respond to an awakening of our national conscience on this matter as well. But as year after year passes and this question remains in judicially-imposed stasis, out of reach of the democratic process, we are faced with nagging doubts: what if we can never achieve a peaceful end to the legalized mass killing of small human beings in this country? If the day comes that we reach this conclusion, will the rise of a new John Brown be inevitable? If so, how will we as conscientious pro-lifers deal with such individuals? We are fooling ourselves if we dismiss these as easy or morally unserious questions, and we wrong the defenseless innocent if we agree, for the sake of politeness, not to discuss them.

The only way to ensure justice in a society is for the law to recognize that all humans are humans, and therefore entitled to equal protection under the law. Whenever the law takes the position that certain humans (be it slaves or those physically located within a womb) are not in fact humans at all, it is certain that moral outrages will follow, and that other moral outrages will be perpetrated to protect the unjust status quo, and that sooner or later, the conscience of America, however long dormant, will collide with those moral outrages. And although the confronters will and have historically been exceedingly patient, history shows that there is a point at which that patience will run out. Men killed and died to end slavery, and few among us today would condemn them categorically for doing so.

Our consciences will not allow us to bear the horror on a daily basis of contemplating the image of thousands of unborn children kicking and writhing to avoid the instruments of their death – trying in their own primitive way to assert their own will to survive, and their worth as something that is alive and growing. Therefore, in order to carry on with our daily lives (as we must to provide for ourselves and our families), we necessarily push these matters to the backs of our minds until, from time to time, someone like Abby Johnson comes along and reminds us of the ugliness that has been swept underneath the rug of our country.

It is at these times we remember why it is that we participate in this fight even though it wears on us from day to day; why it is that we continue to watch news shows that infuriate us, donate money to candidates that would otherwise be put towards our own retirements, and take time away from our families to pound the pavements, man the phone banks, and get out the word. This is why we ”fight,” if it is still permissible to use such terms to describe battles fought with the ballot box. And it is also why we reject the empty calls for “truce” and silence from those who have hardened their heart to the ugliness, for we know that there can be no truce with unrepentant evil – there can only be victory or defeat.  And for the sake of the country we love, we refuse to accept defeat.

The Apocalypse is upon us. Sarah Palin did something, and Andrew Sullivan professes to not giving a hoot.

What’s next? An admission that Trig is Sarah Palin’s son? Stock up on the canned goods, and shotguns, people. The Seventh Seal is about to be broken, and the Cubs might win the next World Series.

To expound on Pejman’s point – Andrew Sullivan explained to us over and over and over that determining whether Trig Palin was actually Sarah Palin’s son was a matter of great national importance because… well, I don’t really understand the because in this case because I am not afflicted with an organic brain disease. He continued pressing on with this obsession long past the point that all reasonable people – and even most truthers – gave it up as folly.

However, when Sarah Palin – who is undoubtedly a political force in America, agree with her or not – speaks on the one issue that defines Andrew Sullivan, he does not care. The man is officially beyond parody.

You know, I travel a decent amount and I always find myself talking to people about politics wherever I go. I find lots of people who read RedState, lots of people who read Kos, or Hot Air, or Firedoglake, or whatever. I have never in all my travels met anyone who has voluntarily announced that they read Andrew Sullivan every day and love his commentary. I have reached the point that I am eagerly awaiting the occasion when it finally does happen so that I can enjoy pointing in that person’s face and laughing. Hard.

Most of the furor in the blosophere today concerns whether or not Priebus actually did any work with clients on the stimulus bill or not; this all completely misses the point and illustrates that the people who are circulating this attack don’t really have the slightest clue what it is that lawyers do or what our obligations to our clients are. Which is certainly acceptable under ordinary circumstances; I would not want to know about a day in the life of a lawyer myself if my paycheck did not require me to do so. But in this case, the record really does need to be set straight.

In the first place, one of the things that is explained very early on in the career of every law school student is that advocacy on behalf of a client does not indicate endorsement of the client’s views or activities. In fact, this principle is even enshrined in binding ethical canons upon lawyers. The reason for this is that lawyers have an ethical duty to diligently represent their clients to the best of their abilities, which sometimes requires making arguments on a client’s behalf that are necessarily not in line with the personal viewpoints of the lawyer. As a lawyer, you are merely the agent of your client, and have a fiduciary and ethical obligation to use their best independent judgment to maximize results on behalf of their clients. If you, as a lawyer, became aware that your client was eligible for millions of dollars in stimulus money from the Federal Government, and you refused to fill out the paperwork for them (or notify them of their eligibility for the benefits) merely because you politically opposed the stimulus, that would almost certainly amount to legal malpractice and a breach of legal ethics.

Similarly, the fact that Priebus’ law firm advertised their ability to help clients navigate the stimulus bill should also not be understood as a personal endorsement of the stimulus bill by Priebus. Law firms (especially firms that have practice groups that specialize in regulatory and legislative compliance, as Priebus’ firm did), frequently advertise their ability to help clients understand and (where applicable) take advantage of laws and regulations, both State and Federal. Helping prospective clients understand, comply with, and take advantage of changes in the law is a major part of the raison d’etre of lawyers. I mean, if Priebus’ firm had advertised their availability to help industrial clients come into compliance with new EPA regulations on carbon emissions (which would presumably involve advising clients of how to receive credits or tax benefits under the regulations), presumably no one would currently be pushing the story that Priebus was in favor of cap and trade.

This is also different from lobbying, or from representatives taking earmarks. So far as I can tell, nobody has claimed that Priebus did anything to help pass the stimulus bill or otherwise make law. His firm was simply holding itself out as helping private entities make the best of what Congress had already passed. No conservative principle requires conservative lawyers to refuse to help their clients benefit from the law. Yes, there are some situations where a lawyer may well have an objection of conscience to assisting a client with a particularly immoral course of action – abortion comes to mind – but I would hope most people can tell the difference between that sort of extreme situation and this kind of ordinary garden-variety business transaction.

I get that this kind of explanation is part of the reason why people hate lawyers, but it really is a genuine reflection of what lawyers do and the entire reason clients are willing to pay the sorts of hourly rates that lawyers charge. The expectation – enshrined in the law – is that the lawyer will not cost the client millions of dollars in lost opportunities because of his political views on the appropriate size of government. In fact, some individuals (who we suspect are working for Priebus’ rivals) shopped this story to us at RedState yesterday, and despite the surface shock value appeal of the story, we took a pass because it simply isn’t an attack that is honest or meritorious.

Priebus may yet be found to be unsuitable for the job for any number of reasons, but this is not one of them.

UPDATE: Literally as I was composing this post, the lawyers at Holland and Knight emailed me this. After reading it, should we conclude that every single lawyer in the firm approves of the tax compromise and everything contained therein?

OK. Well, I suppose I really wouldn’t want to be put in solitary confinement and have my pillow and blankie taken away. In order to avoid this result, I have made a conscious decision to not access and steal highly classified information from the United States and sell it to a sex offender from Sweden. Thus far, my strategy seems to be working, but if that ever changes, I’m sure you’ll all hear about it on Glenn Greenwald’s blog.

Glenn Greenwald is constantly telling us that the reason the terrorists want to kill us is not because they are regressive degenerates who hate Western values like freedom and tolerance, but rather because they just don’t like our military policies and how we’re all meddling in their business.

Well, I am not a man without a heart, so I am willing to propose a solution to Greenwald’s problem which I am confident the Army would be amenable to. As an added bonus, it will serve as an opportunity to validate Glenn Greenwald’s views on the causes of Islamic terrorism. We will give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back, and remove him from solitary confinement. In fact, we’ll let him be around lots of people. We’ll call an emissary with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and tell them that we have a political prisoner to release to them, no strings attached. We will tell them that we are going to release to them an American who thoroughly rejects our interventionist policies and our military meddling – he rejects them so strongly, in fact, that he did everything in his power to see that American soldiers were killed and that Islamic terrorists were given access to our operational details. Therefore, we have decided to let him go to be with the Taliban so that he can self-actualize and join the fight against America with them.

I’m sure that like John Walker Lindh, the Taliban will be happy to have an American like this on board. So we’ll drive Manning out there to meet them at some safe remote location in Afghanistan somewhere, and we’ll release Manning and let him rush to join his new Taliban brethren.

Then we’ll tell them he’s gay.

The only thing more embarrassing than the conference call was this atrocious “statement” Steele released to the RNC members. Judging by the quality of the writing contained therein, Steele either wrote it himself or had Meghan McCain do it after a weekend-long binge on Four Lokos and deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon. EIther way, the “statement” certainly showcases the competence that has made him a favorite of party activists throughout the entire country, especially here in the South where we were glad to finally have an RNC chair willing to bravely call us all racists. Of course, Steele is not a man to show favoritism; to him, all Republicans who criticize him (a group which includes pretty much all Republicans everywhere) are equally racist.

Click below the fold to find a small sampling of the verbal sausage of Michael Steele, communicator extraordinaire. All typos, grammatical errors, and cheap e.e. cummings rip-offs are in the original:

In partnership, we will continue to build our grand old party into the great opportunity party through consistent and inclusive activities that maintains neutrality for our presidential nominee and strengthens our ground game to victory.
So tonight i come to my bosses with a record that only you can judge, based upon directions you made clear to me from the very beginning. Yes i have stumbled along the way, but have always accounted to you for such shortcomings. No excuses. No lies. No hidden agenda.
Going forward, i ask for your support and your vote for a second term.

** SNIP **

We must forge ahead with an infrastructure that is governed by the insights and input of the 168 members who govern the RNC.

** SNIP **

• Working together to immediately retire the committee’s debt and strategically working to restore our resources for strategic 2011 and 2012. (Ed. – I seriously didn’t edit that at all. Check for yourself)

** SNIP **

Collectively, we secured over $179 million, 37% more than the DNC in the comparable 2006 cycle. Since, the political and financial landscape has changed – and it has changed – the RNC will dramatically increase its fundraising for the 2012 cycle. We will do so by continuing to build our unmated small donor programs and augmenting it with an expanded and updated major donor program which takes into our new reality. (Ed. – In all seriousness, this is exactly how the paragraph occurred in the original.)

** SNIP **

This enhanced major donor program will be organized in several ways – for example, geographically and by shared interests; but, but it will also include a direct role for RNC Members for expanding the abilities of the party to raise funds nationally, but to also work with them in developing programs to train and assist state parties in raising money locally. (Ed. – All three “but”s in the previous paragraph/run-on sentence merely copied and pasted from the original. Honest.)

Back when I was a 2L in law school, the career services office sat us all down and explained to us, over and over, that we needed to triple-check our resumes for spelling errors and typos. Law firms, we were assured, are staffed with professional people, and they will assume that if you can’t bother to make your freaking resume error free, you sure as hell aren’t going to bother with making your work error free. This sound advice made perfect sense to all of us even though we knew that we were merely applying to be one of thousands of first-year associates loosed on the world.

This “statement,” such as it is, essentially constitutes Michael Steele’s resume to be the one and only RNC Chair in the entire universe. Given the quality of his work as RNC Chair over the previous term, I don’t suppose any of us should be shocked that it contains as many errors as it does.

And yes, all of you wiseacres reading this post, I am quite sure as I dash off this post in the middle of the night, that I have made at least one typo and probably several grammatical errors, both minor and major. As a self-imposed punishment for my sins, I am hereby withdrawing my name from consideration as RNC Chair.

To begin with, Judge Hudson specifically refused to enjoin the Act’s enforcement pending appeal (a decision which will likely not be revisited by the Fourth Circuit whenever they get around to hearing the appeals). More importantly, Judge Hudson – improperly, in my view – severed the individual mandate from the Act as a whole.  If that decision stands, it could well result in the wholesale destruction of private health insurance companies in the United States. It is also worth noting that this lawsuit did not address the potential capitation problems being litigated in the Florida lawsuit.

The largest legal hurdle the Virginia AG had to clear in arguing that the individual mandate was not within Congress’ Commerce Clause powers was avoiding the argument that this case was controlled by Wickard v. Fillburn, in which the Supreme Court upheld the application of a federal regulation imposed upon an individual wheat farmer.  The Supreme Court in Wickard reasoned that although the particular wheat farmer at issue certainly had a de minimis effect on interstate commerce, the aggregate effect of all wheat farmers nationwide did have a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce, and therefore Congress had acted within their Commerce Clause powers in enacting the act.  More recently, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Wickard with respect to individual marijuana growers in Gonzales v. Raich, which I suspect is the one judicial opinion in his career that Scalia would like to have back.

After Wickard, many observers predicted that no legislation would ever again be struck down as an impermissible exercise of Congress’ Commerce Clause powers. After all, if Congress is permitted to aggregate hundreds of millions of de minimis effects caused by the behavior of American citizens in order to clear the bar of a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce, it stands to reason that any activity, if repeated often enough by enough people, will have a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce and thus be within Congress’ power to regulate.

However, within the last 15 years, the Supreme Court issued a couple of surprising decisions which seemed to walk back that principle somewhat. In United States v. Morrison, the Court ruled that the Violence Against Women Act exceeded Congress’ Commerce Clause powers, because (essentially) the Commerce Clause was never intended to convey general police powers on the Federal Government. In United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court struck down federal law prohibiting a person from knowingly carrying a firearm within a certain distance from a school for similar reasons.  The essential teaching of Morrison and Lopez, when compared with Wickard and Gonzales, is that the Supreme Court would look much more favorably upon a law which purported to regulate “economic activity” as opposed to a law which essentially operated to enforce general police powers in the guise of regulating commerce.

It may strike you, upon reading this, that a challenge to the individual mandate portion of Obamacare would seem to fall much more into the “economic activity” pile than the statutes at issue in Morrison and Lopez, and indeed that is exactly what Sebelius argued in this case. Ultimately, however, the Court rejected this argument based on the premise that the individual mandate does not in fact regulate activity but instead penalizes inactivity:

In her argument, the Secretary urges an expansive interpretation of the concept of activity. She posits that every individual in the United States will require health care at some point in their lifetime, if not today, perhaps next week or even next year. Her theory further postulates that because near universal participation is critical to the underwriting process, the collective effect of refusal to purchase health insurance affects the national market.  Therefore, she argues, requiring advance purchase of insurance based upon a future contingency is an activity that will inevitably affect interstate commerce.  Of course, the same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definitionof the economic activity subject to Congressional regulation lacks logical limitation and is unsupported by Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

Indeed, Judge Hudson seems here to have hit on the crux of this particular battle. Clearly, Morrison and Lopez suggest that the Supreme Court is not willing to endorse the proposition that Congress can do literally whatever it wants in the name of affecting interstate commerce. What Lopez and Morrison do not clearly answer is the question, “How far is too far?” Judge Hudson believes that the individual mandate is too far. Ultimately, the Supremes will have the last word on this question, and I do not have a particularly good sense of which direction Anthony Kennedy will lean.

Somewhat shockingly, Sebelius argued forcefully that the penalty imposed by the individual mandate was not a penalty but was instead a tax, and therefore permissible under Congress’ taxation powers (which are hypothetically broader than Congress’ powers to regulate interstate commerce). This seems to me to have been a rather half-hearted argument and one which the Court disposed of with extreme prejudice – noting, after all, that if the Act works as intended, it will raise zero revenue because no one will pay the penalty. This is contained on pp. 25-37 of the opinion if you are interested, but in my view, this will not be where the fight is before the Supreme Court.

The problematic portion of this opinion is the end. Judge Hudson refused to enjoin enforcement of the Act, reasoning (defensibly, I suppose) that there are yet a few years before the Act’s provisions become enforceable, which should hypothetically provide time for the appeals process to play out.  The more problematic portion involves Judge Hudson’s discussion of the severability of the Act. As we have discussed here before, Obamacare did not include a severability provision.  Therefore, under traditional canons, if a portion of the Act is found to be unconstitutional, the entire thing should be thrown out (as the Supreme Court did with Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, but perplexingly did not with Sarbanes-Oxley).

Judge Hudson seems to have reasoned that he could not determine whether the Act as a whole would have passed without the individual mandate portion, despite Sebelius’ strenuous arguments throughout the case that the individual mandate is the central lynchpin which makes the Act make financial sense. Moreover, as a common sense matter, if the individual mandate provision is struck down and the pre-existing condition ban remains in place, every private insurance carrier in the country will be bankrupted in short order.  One would assume this was not the intent of Congress when they passed the bill (although with this Congress, I suppose anything is possible). That fact notwithstanding, Judge Hudson unhelpfully severed the individual mandate “and directly-dependent provisions which make specific reference” to the individual mandate (whatever those might be) from the rest of the bill and left the remainder intact. As stated before, the main comfort we can take from this state of affairs is that this decision will likewise be subject to plenary review by the Supreme Court.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Breyer said history stands with the dissenters in the court’s decision to overturn a Washington, D.C., handgun ban in the 2008 case “D.C. v. Heller.” 

Breyer wrote the dissent and was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He said historians would side with him in the case because they have concluded that Founding Father James Madison was more worried that the Constitution may not be ratified than he was about granting individuals the right to bear arms. 

Here we have a Supreme Court Justice appearing on television to spout some truly moronic tripe. Even if we grant Breyer’s characterization of the history with respect to Madison (and I gather that this is a subject of some debate), that does not at all lead to the conclusion that therefore, the founding fathers would have been fine with the DC gun ban at issue in Heller.  In fact, the number of logical leaps and bounds (over yawning chasms of total and utter nonsense) required to get from Point A to Point B in this circumstance are so numerous that only an idiot would make the attempt. Or, in this case, a partisan desperate to appear nonpartisan.

Nevertheless, the substance of Breyer’s arguments aside, I find Breyer’s sudden solicitousness for utilizing history in interpreting the constitution to be refreshing and hope that it will continue:

“If you’re interested in history, and in this one history was important, then I think you do have to pay attention to the story,” Breyer said. “If that was his motive historically, the dissenters were right. And I think more of the historians were with us.”

That being the case, and particularly since the Founding Fathers did not foresee how modern day would change individual behavior, government bodies can impose regulations on guns, Breyer concluded.

Alright, Steve, let’s make a deal. We’ll concede your point that the history should be dispositive on the issue of handguns and the Second Amendment, if you’ll concede the point that absolutely no one will seriously suggest that the founding fathers had abortion in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment. We’ll disarm our emanations and penumbras if you deep six yours. Deal?

Of course, I don’t think for a minute that Breyer is going to start taking constitutional history seriously as a universal proposition, or even that he really cares about the history surrounding the Second Amendment. The simple truth here is that there is no tool that a partisan hack will not summon to his side if his party requires it.