Jack of Harts

A judge who donated to the current president, and whose daughter is linked to fundraising efforts to raise millions of dollars of campaign funds for the president, has presided over a trial and a jury formed in one of the president’s most loyal voting districts, where the president’s challenger and previous president was found guilty of charges about accounting issues linked to fundraising efforts. Charges that expired years ago and could not be charged, unless another law was violated. According to the public charging documents and reports from inside the courtroom, the prosecution never revealed these underlying charges to the court and the judge did not allow the defense to bring in experts to argue what underlying laws may have been in question, or to even proactively argue them. Some reports say they revealed these underlying laws in final arguments, on the last day, after the defense had made its final arguments and could not argue the merits of the prosecution case, but that the jury’s verdict does not say what underlying laws they found him guilty of. Not all reports are clear at this time. But one thing is clear. The political show trials will continue.

A well regulated (a word that meant trained when it was written) Militia (all of the people when it was written), being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms (a general word for weapons), shall not be infringed (a word that meant hindered or outlawed or otherwise made difficult). The implementation and debate over the Second Amendment has changed radically over the centuries, but we should remember what it meant when it was written so we can understand how we should use it now.