Judge Alito

[Tepker, Rick]

>From Jeffrey Rosen's article in the New Republic on possible candidates for the Court:
 
"What should be far more troubling to Senate Democrats, however, is Alito's 1996 dissent from a decision upholding the constitutionality of a federal law prohibiting the possession of machine guns. Applying the logic of the Constitution in Exile for all it's worth, Alito insisted that the private possession of machine guns was not an economic activity, and there was no empirical evidence that private gun possession increased violent crime in a way that substantially affected commerce--therefore, Congress has no right to regulate it. Alito's colleagues criticized him for requiring 'Congress or the Executive to play Show and Tell with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute.' His lack of deference to Congress is unsettling."
 
I'd think that judicial tinkering with statutes about automatic weapons might be problematic in the post-9/11 world.  
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