Ten years after the bombing of Baghdad and the start of the Iraq war, Seymour Hersh asks, what’s up with our Constitution? “How could a small group of hard-line conservatives around President Bush… so quickly throw us over the cliff? It’s not enough to blame it on the fear, anger, and confusion brought on by the 9/11 attacks… Is our Constitution that fragile?” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/ZBToV5

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum. See more images from “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq.”

John Cassidy on Congressional Republicans, “about to endorse another damaging economic idea that should be consigned to the history books: a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/WFsZZF

Jeffrey Toobin looks at the changing interpretation of the Second Amendment through history, and the invention of gun rights: Conservatives “mock the so-called liberal idea of a ‘living’ constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YfUc6s

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty.

Jeffrey Toobin on the judicial backlash to some states’ attempts to limit the right to vote: it “may recede after the 2012 election—or it may establish an important new constitutional right… In any case, even with action by the high court, the law looks different today than it did at the beginning of the 2012 campaign. The courts, by ensuring an equal playing field, have done their job.”

(Source: newyorker.com)

Trayvon Martin and America’s Gun Laws

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously. In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.