Majority of Congress urges Supreme Court to strike D.C. gun ban
 |
A majority of Congress filed a brief Friday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns.
Joined by Vice President Dick Cheney, 55 senators and 250 representatives told the court that “Congress has a long history of protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was proposed to the States by the Congress in 1789. On several occasions, in different epochs of American history, the Congress enacted statutory texts which explicitly declared its understanding of the Second Amendment as guaranteeing fundamental, individual rights.”
Along with a majority of Republicans in both chambers, sixty-eight Democrats in the House and nine in the Senate signed on to the brief:
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), who led the effort to file the friend-of-the-court brief, said her staff could not find another instance in which such a large portion of Congress had taken a position on an issue before the court.
“This court should give due deference to the repeated findings over different historical epochs by Congress, a co-equal branch of government, that the amendment guarantees the personal right to possess firearms,” their brief contends.
The court will hear argument in District of Columbia v. Heller on March 18.