The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.
Or perhaps it’s not as remarkable as we’ve been led to think.
So begins my opinion piece published at Cato.org. I then discuss areas in which the conservative Justices have taken a broader view of individual rights than the liberal Justices–commercial speech, expressive association, election-related speech, property rights, racial preferences, free exercise of religion, “hate speech”–and conclude:
There are many ideological differences between the conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court. But a consistent, stronger liberal devotion to supporting individual rights and civil liberties against assertions of government power isn’t one of them.