October 31, 2018
By Vin Suprynowicz
Nevada voters will choose Nov. 6 between lower-court judges Jerry Tao and Elissa Cadish for a seat on their state Supreme Court. And Cadish presumably has to be favored, having raised six times as much money for the race - more than $600,000 to date, against Judge Tao's $100,000.
Jerry Tao is an honest and fully competent judge (though he's faced official criticism for accurately dubbing his opponent a "leftist." Oh, the horror!) Elissa Cadish - a native of Brooklyn, N.Y. - is smart, a quick and sharp legal mind. She’s also arrogant, elitist, and jaw-droppingly anti-gun.
Interviewing her back when she sought her first judgeship, I asked Ms. Cadish whether jurors should be informed that they have the right to judge the law as well as the facts -– to refuse to convict if they believe a law is unjust or unjustly applied. She said no. I pointed out that if the courts screen out fully-informed jurors during “voir dire,” they’re not really seating juries randomly selected “on the country,” as they’re supposed to. She replied that the juries in her courtroom are “randomly selected” from among those who agree to follow the judge’s orders.
Wait. It gets worse. Why isn’t Elissa Cadish a FEDERAL judge?
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Back in 2012, then U.S. Sen. Harry Reid - seldom a friend of our personal liberties - nominated Cadish to fill the U.S. District Court seat being left vacant when Judge Philip Pro decided to semi-retire, taking “senior judge” status (the attempted Reid appointment pretty well confirming Ms. Cadish’s political leanings.)
But in a somewhat unusual move, Nevada’s Republican Senator, Dean Heller, used a traditional Senate privilege to block Cadish - a nominee from his own state -- from receiving a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Though coy at first about his reasoning, Heller later cited a questionnaire Judge Cadish had filled out when running for her current seat on the state bench in 2008. When asked whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms, she replied, “I do not believe that there is this constitutional right. Thus, I believe that reasonable restrictions may be imposed on gun ownership in the interest of public safety. Of course, I will enforce the laws as they exist as a judge .”
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Read it again. Elissa Cadish wrote “I do not believe that there is this constitutional right."
If you’re a Nevadan with any respect for the Bill of Rights, do you want such a person on the state Supreme Court, where judges actually get to rule on whether new "gun control" proposals are "constitutional"? Think about it.
Vin Suprynowicz was for 20 years an editorial writer and syndicated columnist for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal. He blogs at www.vinsuprynowicz.com .
