Quick Read About Heller

For anyone else interested in the Heller case, which will be heard on Tuesday, this article by Bob Novak is worth reading. If his sources are to be believed, the Bush Administration’s brief in the case is a miscommunication between the President and the Solicitor General’s office.

I’m wondering how unusual it would be for the Solicitor General to give an oral argument contrary to a position he took in his written brief. Something tells me it would be pretty darn unique, but I’ll have to consult my in-house lawyer on that. Shelly? (UPDATE: Shelly confirms this would be highly unusual)

However, more disturbing is the insinuation that President Bush is powerless to request Justice to withdraw the brief and change it. Novak attributes this to pressure from Democrats not to interfere with the Justice department. For starters, if that’s true, it basically means that Bush has abandoned any pretense of leadership on domestic conservative issues, preferring to focus exclusively on Iraq.

Really, though, it also means he’s getting incredibly bad advice. Confronting Justice on this in the most public way possible would only help him. The Democrats really couldn’t say too much to him about it, since majorities of both houses of Congress signed an amici brief to the right of the position the Solicitor General took! Are they going to attack the President for agreeing with the position their own body took?

But even if the Democrats were fighting tooth and nail on this, Bush would probably still see a net gain from taking a stand on the issue. Nothing hurts Democrats worse than going against gun rights (hence the reason they’ve barely addressed the issue the last 2 elections). If Bush had come out the day after the brief was filed and said “I’m sorry, there was a big misunderstanding, we need to take another look at this,” the worst that would have happened would have been Pelosi mumbling a token objection and then letting the issue go. Democrats would not have engaged in a long attack on the issue; if they had, the issue would have alienated the conservative Dems and Independents that gave the Democrats their 2006 majority. That would have forced Obama and Clinton to take weigh in on it, which they desperately don’t want to do. The whole thing would have been red meat for the conservative base. But that wouldn’t have happened, because the Democratic leadership knows the issue is a huge loser for them, and they aren’t stupid enough to pick a fight over it.

So, in total, not very encouraging, but hopefully Novak is right in that the government will argue something different than what they submitted in their brief.

We’ll see on Tuesday. Stay tuned.

(By the way, I'll be posting again tonight or possibly tomorrow night in other news. Quite a few developments, not least of which, as confirmed in an incident this week, the Hawkins women's tradition of rocky relationships with waterfowl has been passed on to the next generation.)