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Virginia Republicans have not won a statewide election in more than a decade.

In a June primary, three GOP hopefuls, all rookies in Virginia politics, are seeking a chance to break that drought by defeating Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in November. Theres a big, added challenge for candidates without statewide name recognition campaigning amid COVID-19, which has killed more than 1,000 Virginians, according to state data.

The candidates have exchanged living room meetings with prospective voters for Zoom sessions, in-person events for live Q&As on Facebook and door knocking for phone calls in their bid to unseat Warner, a former governor who was first elected to the Senate in 2008.

Not since Bob McDonnell was elected to the Executive Mansion in 2009, leading a GOP sweep for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, has a Republican carried the state. Thats the same year that Sen. John Warner, the last Republican to represent Virginia in the U.S. Senate, completed his 30-year tenure.

We have three incredible candidates to take on Mark Warner this year, Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Jack Wilson said recently. Any one of them would be better than our current hyper-partisan, Virginia-last senator.

Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, narrowly edged Republican Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, in the 2014 midterm election. This year Warner has bigger advantages in name recognition and fundraising, as well as a presidential year voter turnout that ordinarily benefits Democrats in Virginia. Democrats have made gains in Virginia in each election since President Donald Trumps election in 2016.

Appearing on the primary ballot to decide his challenger will be Nottoway County civics teacher Alissa Baldwin of Victoria in Lunenburg County, American University professor Daniel Gade of Alexandria, and Army reservist Thomas Speciale, a Woodbridge resident.

A fourth candidate, former Georgetown University basketball player Omari Faulkner, did not qualify after not garnering enough signatures, despite his successful lawsuit against the state Elections Department to lower the signature threshold from 10,000 to 3,500 because of COVID-19.

Gade has raised more than five times as much money ($488,499) as Speciale ($80,346) and Baldwin ($7,812) combined, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

Thats still far below what Warner has raised, with the incumbent bringing in a little more than $9 million so far, according to VPAP.

Gov. Ralph Northam pushed the date of the primary from June 9 to June 23 because of COVID-19. State and local officials have encouraged voters to cast absentee ballots to prevent large crowds, which remain banned under the governors stay-at-home order, at the polls.

With about a month until the primary, heres a look at the three Republicans looking to end the GOPs statewide dry spell.

Civics teacher looks to restore We the People

Alissa Baldwin never envisioned becoming a teacher.

She wanted to be a lawyer since the second grade, aligning her dreams and actions with what she felt would result in acceptance to law school. During her senior year at the University of Richmond, however, she got rejected.

I was very intentional so everything would build me up for pre-law and serving others through supporting the judicial branch of government and the legal system, she said. To have that kind of setback became an opportunity to rise above an obstacle. It set me on a very different path.

Baldwin stayed in the Richmond region, working as a paralegal and law firm administrator before getting burned out from work. Unsure of what to do next, she got an unsolicited job offer from Lunenburg County Public Schools in Southside Virginia, where she grew up.

She accepted the job to teach history at Central High School, with her first day of work coming on the first day of school.

I issued [the students] a textbook and then I issued myself a textbook, Baldwin said.

Sixteen years later, Baldwin, 41, remains in the classroom, now teaching middle school civics in nearby Nottoway County. She gives her students a pocket Constitution at the end of the school year, highlighting her favorite words in the founding documents preamble: We the People.

Those words have inspired her run for U.S. Senate.

Weve lost sight of that with having so many career politicians, she said. For me, entering this race is about a return to our roots. Our Constitution of then is still our great Constitution of today.

Baldwin, who was born in Prince William County before her parents moved the family to southern Virginia, said she hopes to expand school choice, limit access to abortions and make health care more affordable, among other issues.

Im the person to bring us forward because I am so different, she said. Im not focused as much on the party as I am the principles we believe in.

If elected, Baldwin would be the first female U.S. senator from Virginia.

Army veteran sees bid as extension of service

As Daniel Gade bled out in 2005 after being wounded in combat for the second time, a call went out in the mess hall of the Navy ship where he was being treated: If anyone had A-positive blood, they needed it.

Gades injuries, the result of an explosion in Iraq as Gade rode in a Humvee, had already exhausted the medical units blood supply. Without hesitation, 25 sailors and Marines answered the call and donated.

I have the blood of heroes in my veins, says Gade, whose right leg was amputated. That blood saved my life.

The people who saved my life taught me and hopefully everybody else an important lesson that day, which is that when we have a hard problem to solve, like one of our friends is bleeding to death, we ought to come together to solve the problem, even if we have things that divide us.

Gade wants to unify the Republican Party and he sees his run as an extension of his more than two decades of military service.

As a soldier for 25 years, I was supporting and defending the Constitution. Thats the oath a soldier takes, Gade said. The oath that a senator takes is the same oath. I feel as though our political class, not just Mark Warner, but many, many others, have failed in their oath to support and defend the Constitution and its time to return to a system in which the Constitution is respected.

The 45-year-old grew up in North Dakota before attending the United States Military Academy at West Point. His military service earned him two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star.

Even after the second combat injury, Gade declined to be discharged from the military. Instead he served in the Bush and Trump administrations, focusing on helping veterans get jobs. In 2017 he retired from the Army and now teaches at American University, living in Alexandria with his wife and three children.

Gade said key issues for his campaign are limiting the size of government, maintaining a strong national defense and protecting individual rights, including the Second Amendment.

Gade, who has received the endorsement of several state senators, said that if he is elected his first bill would be the Stop Insider Trading (SIT) Act. The bill would require members of Congress to put their investments in a blind trust and forbid them from using for personal benefit information they receive because theyre in Congress.

Theyre supposed to be there serving and instead they begin to act like hogs at a trough, he said. Its got to stop.

The issue has gained more prominence in recent months after several members of Congress, including Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., sold stocks before the coronavirus epidemic spread in the U.S.

Army reservist hopes to fight gun control

Thomas Speciale remembers driving to work in June 2016, the day after a gunman in Orlando, Fla., killed 49 people and wounded 53 others inside a gay nightclub. He listened as Democrats called for more gun control and felt a grip of fear and that they were right.

Then I remembered that thats a lie, he said. We do not have a gun violence problem. We have a mental health problem.

Speciale, who runs a small gun safety training company, attended Januarys mass rally in Richmond in support of gun rights. He was one of the 16,000 people who stayed outside Capitol Square, where an estimated 6,000 more had gathered, because he didnt want to give up his ability to carry a gun. (Gov. Ralph Northam banned guns inside Capitol Square during the rally, citing safety threats.)

As a candidate, Speciale has vowed to work to abolish and remove current gun laws, upset over what he describes as a socialist agenda to disenfranchise people from their liberty.

Our Constitution is being dismantled right before our very eyes, he said. If you take away guns, theres no way to stop the government from controlling your life because the Second Amendment protects our liberty.

He also wants to reform the immigration and criminal justice systems, and promote school choice.

Speciale, 51, entered the military in 1987, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers. The Illinois State University alumnus is a chief warrant officer in the Army Reserves. Hes married and has three children and one stepson. His oldest son serves in the Navy.

He hopes to parlay the activism around gun rights and gun control Democrats passed seven of the eight gun control measures Northam proposed this session into a primary victory and an upset election over Warner.

For me its been a lifelong fight to protect our country and to protect our allies abroad and those who love liberty and freedom from tyranny and oppression, he said.

Read more here:
Meet the Republicans looking to unseat Sen. Mark Warner - Richmond.com

Monday's order is a victory -- for now -- for supporters of gun regulations who feared the justices would take an idiosyncratic state law and use it as a vehicle to expand upon a landmark opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia from 2008 that held for the first time that an individual had a right to keep and bear arms at home for self-defense.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The case marked the first major gun rights case heard by President Donald Trump's two nominees. Gorsuch joined the dissent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, on the other hand, said in a concurring opinion that while the court should sidestep the case at hand, he also agreed with the dissenters' concerns that lower courts have been thumbing their noses at Supreme Court precedent on the 2nd Amendment and said the court should "address that issue soon."

When the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, the law blocked individuals from removing a handgun from the address listed on the license except to travel to nearby authorized small arms ranges or shooting clubs.

New York argued the rule was not a burden on 2nd Amendment rights and that it represented a reasonable means to protect public safety.

The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, a gun owners group and individual plaintiffs challenged the law arguing that it was too restrictive and that a New Yorker could not transport his handgun to his "second home for the core constitutional purpose of self-defense or to an upstate county to participate in a shooting competition, or even across the bridge to a neighboring city for target practice."

Lawyers for the Trump administration sided with the challengers, arguing that "few laws in our history have restricted the right to keep and bear arms as severely as this ban does."

In a twist, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the city allowed licensed owners to take handguns to other locations, including second homes or shooting ranges outside city limits. In addition, the State of New York amended its handgun licensing statute to require localities to allow licensed gun owners to engage in such transport.

As a result, New York argued the justices should dismiss the case.

Lawyers challenging the law countered that the only reason it was amended was supporters of gun regulations feared that the Supreme Court's new conservative majority might use the idiosyncratic law to render a broad decision cutting back on gun restrictions.

An 'epiphany of sorts,' Alito says of New York

In his dissent, Alito expressed frustration that the court had declined to decide whether the city's law violated the 2nd Amendment.

"Although the city had previously insisted that its ordinance served important public safety purposes, our grant of review apparently led to an epiphany of sorts, and the city quickly changed its ordinance," Alito wrote.

Alito stressed that even though the law had been changed, those challenging it had not been provided with all the relief they sought.

"Petitioners got most, but not all, of the prospective relief they wanted," Alito wrote, "and that means that the case is not dead." He specifically noted their claims for damages.

Alito also took special aim at a "friend of the court" brief filed by Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and others, suggesting the senators had tried to intimidate the court.

"Five United States Senators, four of whom are members of the bar of this Court, filed a brief insisting that the case be dismissed," Alito wrote.

Whitehouse had suggested that if the court did not dismiss the case, the public would believe the court was motivated by politics. "The Supreme Court is not well," Whitehouse wrote. "Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it to be restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics."

"If a case is on our docket and we have jurisdiction," Alito retorted, "we have an obligation to decide it."

Alito said he would have found that the New York City ordinance was unconstitutional and that it burdened the right to bear arms that was recognized in the court's 2008 decision called District of Columbia v. Heller. He said there is "cause for concern" that lower courts are not abiding by that decision.

"History provides no supporter for a restriction of this type," Alito said.

The gun-control groups Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund and Moms Demand Action welcomed the court's decision on Monday, with Everytown President John Feinblatt saying in a statement that the court "just thwarted the gun lobby's hope for a broad ruling that could slow the gun safety movement's growing momentum."

Brady President Kris Brown said the case was "moot" in December when the court first heard arguments. "The issue at the heart of this case was already resolved and the plaintiffs had already received everything they had demanded and more. Recognizing this, the court's decision that there is no case here is common-sense," Brown said in a statement. "That the court recognizes this too merely underscores the desperation of the NRA and their allies to use this issue to advance a radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment."

The justices announced that next Friday, when they hold their regularly scheduled conference, they will discuss whether to take up other 2nd Amendment cases for next term. The conference is a private telephone call between the justices.

UPDATE: This story has been updated with additional reaction.

Visit link:
Supreme Court avoids new Second Amendment ruling, dealing blow to gun rights advocates - CNN

AR-15 rifles displayed for sale at a gun show in Oaks, Pa., in 2017 (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

The Supreme Court should and will take a Second Amendment case very soon, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) wont be happy. When Whitehouse basically threatened the Supreme Court over a recent Second Amendment case, perhaps he didnt realize that he could get what he wanted and still lose the fight. This week, although the Court dismissed as moot the case that had Whitehouse in a tizzy, the Court is reviewing a slew of Second Amendment petitions that hell like even less.

The mooted case, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. NYC, was a challenge to NYCs bizarre travel restrictions for permitted gun owners and the first Second Amendment case the Court had taken in a decade. After the justices agreed to hear the case, New York City and New York state, fearing a decision that would strengthen the Second Amendment, moved quickly to change the law to keep the Court from issuing a decision. This is a form of strategic mooting, because courts generally dont hear controversies that are no longer live because there is no relief a court can give if the law has already been changed. And while strategic mooting is fairly common, its an unsavory form of gamesmanship with the Courts docket.

New York City asked that the case be removed from the docket, and Whitehouse, joined by four other senators, wrote an infamous amicus brief urging the Court to dismiss the case. Whitehouse didnt just confine his arguments to the legal question of mootness. He came within a hairs breadth of outright accusing the Courts Republican-appointed justices as being shills for the NRA and the Federalist Society. His shocking brief closed with what many interpreted as a threat to restructure the Court if the justices didnt go along with his request. The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.

On Monday, the justices, by a 6-3 vote, dismissed the case as moot. The same day, they added ten held-over Second Amendment petitions to the Courts calendar. These are petitions that were being held pending the Courts decision in the New York case. The justices will discuss these petitions Friday, with decisions likely to be released on Monday.

Five of the petitions challenge various states good reason restrictions on the right to carry a weapon outside the home. Eight states issue carry permits provided that the applicant meets certain objective criteria (e.g. a criminal background check) as well as the vague subjective criterion that the applicant demonstrates a justified need to carry a firearm, often determined by a local sheriff. This has long been thought unconstitutional, and with good reason: No other constitutional right can be conditioned on the subjective determination of a local official. I wouldnt want a Sheriff Sheldon Whitehouse determining whether I can carry a gun.

Another petition challenges Californias microstamping requirement, which requires new pistols to stamp the casing with an identifiable mark for better tracking. Problem is, no gun manufacturer has figured out how to do this. Its akin to a law saying people have a right to free speech only if theyve turned lead into gold.

There are also a couple of petitions challenging so-called assault weapons bans and high-capacity magazine restrictions, and a petition challenging the federal ban on interstate firearm sales, which for some reason irrationally applies to handguns but not rifles.

The Court needs to take a Second Amendment case soon, whether its one of these cases or another. In the ten years since the Court took a Second Amendment case, the lower courts have floundered to figure out what the decisions in Heller and McDonald mean. The Ninth Circuit has made a habit out of rubber-stamping almost any restriction on firearms. For example, the court upheld Californias ten-day waiting period law as it applied to those who passed the background check in fewer than ten days and were already owners of a firearm or even had a concealed carry permit.

The Seventh Circuit, on the other hand, struck down Chicagos ban on shooting ranges in the city correctly reasoning that if the purpose of the Second Amendment is to allow guns for self-defense, then that entails the ability to practice with the gun. In response to the Seventh Circuits decision, the city created an elaborate set of regulations for shooting ranges that left only 2.2 percent of the city even theoretically available for shooting ranges. The Seventh Circuit struck those down too.

Theres a wide variance between the circuits where seemingly any gun law is okay and those, like the Seventh, that take the Second Amendment seriously. One of the Courts most important jobs is to rectify that variance. Theyll soon take a case to do that, and Senator Whitehouse will again be unhappy.

Read this article:
The Second Amendment Will Soon Be Back at the Supreme Court - National Review

To the editor:

I think most people would hope and expect our government officials to put aside their political agendas in these difficult times and concentrate on defeating the COVID-19 crisis. Apparently that is not the case and I am not referring to the idiots in Washington. Our own Massachusetts attorney general recently misused her position of political power to accuse the Second Amendment community of being a threat to "police officers, first responders, and domestic violence victims." These false and derogatory accusations regarding lawful firearm owning residents should require an apology. Apparently our Attorney General feels she is above the law and our governor is unwilling to correct her.

The Baker administration has further utilized the crisis to discriminate against our Constitutional Second Amendment rights. In mid-March, the administration announced an emergency loan program for small businesses. The program is being run through the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation (MGCC). Only five types of businesses were declared ineligible for Massachusetts emergency small business loans and firearm retailers are one of them! This is pure discrimination against family owned firearm retailers who have bills to pay and families to raise. These businesses pay local property taxes and employ local citizens. I am sure the goal of this discrimination is the hope that these businesses will promptly go out of business.

Thousands of law-abiding firearm owners are facing the expiration of their FID and LTC licenses. New applications and renewal requests are being denied due to social distancing requirements and other priorities of the police. The Baker administration has no plans in place to extend these permits as they have for numerous other licenses. Imagine the public outrage if you could not register a new vehicle, renew a vehicle registration or renew a business license. Apparently the governor wants to discriminate against our Second Amendment rights and create a whole new group of unlicensed firearm owners.

Please call Gov. Baker's office at 617-725-4005 and give him this simple and straight forward statement: "Continue the fight against COVID-19, but end this vendetta against the Second Amendment Civil Rights community!" In addition, do not forget who violated our Second Amendment rights when it comes time to vote!

Richard Ladd,

Pittsfield

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If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us. We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom.

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Letter: 2nd Amendment rights violated by state - Berkshire Eagle

Chief Justice Roberts has drawn a sharp rebuke for condoning the Supreme Court majoritys April 27 decision refusing to take up a Second Amendment case. But the critique of the decision as politically motivated is deeply misguided and potentially harmful to the perceived legitimacy of the federal bench and the rule of law itself. The decision was not an enormous abdication of judicial prerogative, as some have irresponsibly claimed but, rather, a routine and proper refusal to take up an issue that had been rendered moot.

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York, the Court in a per curiam opinion (meaning there is no attributed author) effectively dismissed a case challenging a New York City handgun law, which had prevented handgun owners from carrying firearms to second homes or shooting ranges outside of the city. Recall that in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court in 2008 recognized a Second Amendment right to own a handgun in the home for self-defense. The question raised in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association case was whether that right extended to the transport of firearms outside of the home.

The lower courts upheld the law. But while the case was pending before the Supreme Court, the State of New York amended its firearm licensing statute, and the City amended the rule so that petitioners may now transport firearms to a second home or shooting range outside of the city, which is the precise relief that petitioners requested in the prayer for relief in their complaint. The Court thus found the case moot.

In arguing against mootness, the petitioners claimed that it is still conceivable under the new law that they may not be allowed to stop for coffee, gas, food, or restroom breaks on the way to their second homes or shooting ranges outside of the city. The City responded that those routine stops are entirely permissible under the new rule.

If it turns out that the City nonetheless decides to enforce the rule for routine stops in the future, the petitioners could file a new case. But for now, that scenario is entirely hypothetical. There is no concrete injury for the Supreme Court to remedy based on the allegations of the original complaint, which challenged a now-defunct law.

The Supreme Court reviews cases just like courts of appeals. The job of any court on appeal is to review what a lower court did with the precise issue before it. In this case, that issue had totally changed. Whatever the lower court had said about the ordinance which was no longer in effect by virtue of amendments to the law became beside the point. The case clearly needed to be reframed at the lower court level, if at all, under the revised ordinance. Although there are exceptions to the so-called mootness doctrine, appellate courts routinely step away from cases when the underlying problem that was complained about has changed. The case gets remanded for further proceedings.

Mootness serves a very important function in our system of separated government. It keeps courts out of the business of lawmaking, which belongs to the elected branches. Article III of the U.S. Constitution confines federal courts to resolving cases and controversies that is, live disputes between the parties before it. It is the job of the legislature, by contrast, to identify hypothetical scenarios that need fixing and to pass prospective laws attempting to address those scenarios. Judges decide disputes that arose in the past and affect only the parties before the lawsuit not the public in general.

In his dissent, Justice Alito takes pains to outline numerous hypotheticals to make his point that the case is not moot. But Justice Alitos exercise only underscores what mootness is all about: Federal courts are not in the business of resolving hypotheticals. In this case, the actual dispute ended when New York changed the law which is presumably a good result for the plaintiffs leaving nothing for the courts to do.

To attack Chief Justice Roberts for joining his colleagues in refusing to craft prospective limits on New York gun laws from the bench in the absence of a live dispute is wrong as a matter of bedrock constitutional law. It also does gratuitous damage to the publics perception of the court system. With few exceptions, judges work every day to resolve cases based on facts and law and not on politics and its important to underscore this reality so that the public can have confidence in our system of laws.

The majority reached the proper result in this case. It would be highly unusual for an appeals court to move forward with a case where the underlying pleadings do not accurately reflect the current facts and state of affairs.

Kimberly Wehle is a visiting professor of Law at American Universitys Washington College of Law, and a member of an advisory consulting group on judicial independence sponsored by the Rendell Center for Civics & Civic Engagement and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the book, How to Read the Constitutionand Why. Follow her on twitter @kim_wehle

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Mootness is not about politics | TheHill - The Hill