Joe Biden announced last week that he will nominate yet another opponent of the Second Amendment to his proposed cabinet: Judge Merrick Garland.
Garland, currently a judge who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is Biden’s nominee for attorney general. Garland is perhaps most famous for being former President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court following Scalia’s death in 2016—a seat eventually filled by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Garland’s track record on the Second Amendment is clear. As the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) reported, “Garland does not believe the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. On March 9, 2007, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a ruling in Parker v. District of Columbia, the precursor to Heller v. District of Columbia. The opinion struck down the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the civilian ownership of handguns and recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. Expressing disapproval of the panel’s ruling, Garland voted to rehear the case.
Beyond this, Garland also worked earlier in his career against protecting gun owners from registration. In NRA v. Reno (2000), the NRA sued the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop it from retaining transaction records from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) in what the agency coined an “audit log.” Though federal law requires these records to be destroyed, Garland joined a colleague as part of a three-judge panel in upholding the DOJ’s practice, putting gun owners’ privacy at risk.
“Given his long history of hostility towards the Second Amendment and gun owners, Judge Garland is the wrong choice to lead our nation’s Department of Justice,” said NRA-ILA.
Garland is just another in the growing list of anti-Second Amendment nominees to Biden’s proposed cabinet. Already, Biden announced his intentions to nominate California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to his cabinet. And, of course, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Biden’s first official cabinet pick, wants to ban popular firearms and to severely restrict our Second Amendment rights.
