Not at all. I was not arguing in favor of having voted for McCain, but against voting for Obama. Your argument seemed to be that Obama was probably the worse candidate, so vote for him.

Whether McCain would have appointed better justices to SCOTUS or not is debatable but not at issue. We know that Obama did and will appoint justices who will damage freedom and we’ll be stuck with those appointments and their attendant disastrous consequences for decades.

We also know that Obama has appointed an FCC general counsel who lauds Hugo Chavez’s takover of the media in Venezuela, and is working on a dismantling of free speech here.

We also know that Obama will passively let Iran go nuclear. I laugh every time I hear the hot air from the administration, the “stern warnings” after each missile test. Then I remember that soon I may not be laughing.

In other words, he will make policy decisions that will have consequences that we very well might find ourselves unable to undo.

“So TW, it will be interesting to see how this case plays out in regards to your view on this.”

I agree.

As Andrew notes above, the weakness here is the assumption that McCain would have made better choices in the matter — an argument that remains short on substantiation in my experience so far.

But interestingly, I just found out today via HBL that the Supreme Court has granted certiorari on McDonald v. Chicago (08-1521), a gun case in Chicago which at first blush, is being taken as the next step from Heller: answering the question of whether the Second Amendment “incorporates” against the states via the fourteenth Amendment.

The HBL poster, who is a lawyer, indicated that this case has potential for repairing some of the damage done to the protection of individual rights in America by such bad precedents as the Slaughterhouse cases.

A comment from a Volokh Conspiracy post on this case says:

This should be an exceedingly interesting case because judicial conservatives have traditionally loathed the incorporation doctrine. Thus, rather than engaging in maladroit arguments as to whether the right to bear arms is a fundamental right, a more consistent approach might be to argue that the slaughterhouse cases should be overturned and that the right to bear arms should be viewed as a privilege and immunity granted to citizens of the United States.

So TW, it will be interesting to see how this case plays out in regards to your view on this.

As an example, I remember that during the confirmation hearing for John Roberts, the Democrats were reassured by Roberts that he would view acts of Congress with a “presumption of constitutionality” (or something similarly phrased). This presumption is the consensus view that has allowed government power to expand nearly unchecked.

That is a perfectly reasonable choice to make. There wasn’t an option you wanted, so you didn’t support anyone. You didn’t, in other words, vote against your beliefs.

“The battles over the Supreme Court are overrated. ”

Impossible. The Supreme Court is the entity which interprets our Constitution. A president’s appointees to SCOTUS are there for life. That sound you hear right now? It’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg coughing.

I didn’t vote for either candidate. It was thus assured that I would get what I didn’t want. But both candidates were unacceptable, period.

The battles over the Supreme Court are overrated. Conservatives and liberals both accept the “deference to Congress” view that has allowed the welfare-regulatory state to expand steadily for the past century.

Many things are wrong with this, but most practically, the chickens have already begun to come to roost in the Supreme Court, a disaster which we can’t undo perhaps for decades.

If you vote for what you don’t want, you will get what you don’t want and often many times more.

And while it’s entirely positive that a more prominent segment of the population seems to have opened their eyes a bit, I don’t think they present enough influence (nor are they fueled by the proper intellectual thrust) to deter our statist congress, which has given every indication of being hell-bent on passing this bill despite any impending threat to their seats.

What’s a little voter backlash in comparison to the monumental feat of altruistic power-lust that’s currently on the table?

It’s hard for me to see how 2010 nor 2012 matter much with regards to reversing the tremendous blow to freedom and standard of living that will be soundly established when/if HR3200 is passed.

Doubling down *was* better than insurance, but I think best case is a push – except in this game the house still wins.