The Constitution and the Second Amendment are in the spotlight this week on two fronts.  First is that oral arguments are being held in the McDonald v Chicago case to possibly apply the holding in Heller to the states.

In addition, Senators are beginning their evaluation of the judicial nomination of Berkeley professor Goodwin Liu to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a vote that will tell a great deal about Senator Reid’s adherence to Constitutional principles such as those specified in the Second Amendment.

Senator Reid has a terrible record on judicial nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.  In DC v Heller, there were four dissenters from the holding that the right to bear arms is an individual right.  Harry Reid had a chance to vote on three and he voted for each one – Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg.  Harry Reid has a chance to vote on four of the majority justices, and he voted against three of them – Thomas, Alito and Roberts.  If Harry Reid had been successful in defeating any of these three, Heller would have been in jeopardy.  That’s six out of seven bad votes on the Supreme Court.

Four of those bad votes were cast in his very first term, when my primary opponent Sue Lowden was his loyal contributor.

There will be hearings on professor Liu, but I am specifically interested in a particular book he co-authored on jurisprudence entitled “Keeping Faith with the Constitution.”

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It takes a lot to shock us Nevadan’s. We live in a state where gambling is open and legal. Prostitution is legal in some counties.  Taxi cabs are wrapped with pictures of strippers and ads promoting Las Vegas take great pride in telling visitors that they can come here, do what they want, go home and pretend like it never happened (What happens here, Stays here!).  You can’t tell me a little ol’ statement by Pinky from Searchlight (as Harry Reid called himself in a 2004 campaign ad) would set off a firestorm bloodier than a Mike Tyson ear bite. It has. It also sets up a bunch of spy vs. spy scenarios that would make Bugsy Segal proud.

In 2008, during the Barack Obama campaign for President, Reid said privately that it would help Obama that he was a “light-skinned”  African-American, and that Obama speaks “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”.  The quote is in the new book titled, “Game Change”. Reid has given all the apologies and I’m sure he hopes this all goes away quickly, there is that election coming up Nov. 2

Let’s get this out of the way. Harry Reid is not a racist. I’ve known him for 26 years and that is not a problem here. Of course, words have meaning. Republicans George Allen and Trent Lott had their political careers virtually destroyed for much less and Democrats worked overtime to create the impression that the words were enough to send then packing. In 2006, Allen was hammered non-stop for calling an opposition campaign worker, “macaca”. It took days for the media to figure out what a “macaca” was, but they would make sure it was enough to run Allen out of his Virginia Senate seat, destroy any chances he had at the White House, and give the Democrats a majority in the Senate.

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