He Was For It Before He Was Against It

Mark Udall must have been out playing golf when 300 plus members of Congress asked him to cosign the congressional amicus brief on the Second Amendment case that went to the Supreme Court. He couldn't decide whether to use a wood or a putter and in the end, he could only decide to pick up his ball and go home.

Read this statement from Mark Udall's official site. The reasoning sounds exactly like John Kerry's "I voted for the $87 Billion before I voted against it."

If the brief stopped there, I would support it without hesitation. However, it does not stop there. Page 30 of the amicus brief includes declarations that “the District’s handgun ban is unreasonable on its face” and further, that “The lower court’s categorical approach in holding a prohibition on handguns to be unconstitutional per se was correct.”

Clearly, Mark Udall thinks that it was reasonable for the District of Columbia to criminalize the possession of hand guns within its borders for everyone except retired policemen. His stated position is that we citizens have the right to have a weapon with which to protect ourselves except when we don't, and he would side with the Bill Ritter's and the John Morse's who are too quick to say that we don't ever have that right.

Justice Alito asked:

“How could the District code provision survive any standard of review when they totally ban the possession of the type of weapon that’s most commonly used for self-defense…?”

Most troubling is that, as a member of the Senate, Mark Udall would insist on confirming only clones of Breyer, Souter, Ginsberg, and Stephens who would, in the words of Justice Breyer, make the Second Amendment a dead letter. He would let those clones do his dirty work while he piously claimed to be "for gun rights before he was against them.

More on this later in the week.