8-1
Whenever we see a ruling like that, we all immediately know who the 1 is before reading the rest of the article.
Roberts turned to history in his opinion. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.
Some courts have gone too far, Roberts wrote, in applying Bruen and other gun rights cases. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” he wrote.
In dissent, Thomas wrote, the law “strips an individual of his ability to possess firearms and ammunition without any due process.”
The government “failed to produce any evidence” that the law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, he wrote.
“Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” Thomas wrote.
Am I taking crazy pills? Why is some arbitrary reading of history the sole mechanism by which these opinions are being made? What happened to the textual literalism these justices claimed to follow? Doesn’t that require reading the words in the Constitution and making judgements from that?
Why is the arbitrary choice of legislative implementation of the state governments of the 1800s determining what laws states are allowed to have in the 2000s? If they passed a law that was unconstitutional, but no one challenged it for 200 years, then it’s suddenly not only constitutional, but now a metric against which new laws can be judged to determine if they are constitutional? How is that anything but laws “trapped in amber”?
Did I miss the slow court transition to this singular decision-making process? Or was this a sudden shift that I just missed the headlines? I knew they used suspicious historical reasoning in Dobbs to throw out abortion rights, but do they do that for every case now?
It’s Calvinball. They change how they are making the rules to weed out what they don’t like. Don’t like Roe? Throw out the 9th amendment. Don’t like firearm restrictions? Rewrite how we are supposed to interpret the grammar of the constitution. Don’t like other rules? Make up that it has to apply to “history and tradition”. It’s ruling on top of ruling that are impossible to universally apply meaning they get to remain with all of the power to strike down what they don’t like.
Extremely rare court W
The SCOTUS Blog calendar is showing only one more day for opinions, next Wednesday.
Vegas odds say that will change
Why might that be? I ask as someone who doesn’t follow the court until it crosses my eyeline, as with this article.
Well, the bulk of announcements leaves the following fifteen cases:
November - Jarkesy. This is the SEC case with three different questions that go to the heart of whether the SEC, or any administrative enforcement apparatus, is allowed to even exist - Harrington. Bankruptcy case asking whether bankruptcy courts can extinguish entirely third-party claims (a non-debtor suing another non-debtor) as part of the Chapter 11 plan and discharge
January - Relentless, and Loper Bright. Another attempt to gut or fully override Chevron. (Chevron is the case that says that when an administrative agency such as the EPA, which really means their experts, makes a determination within that agency’s authority, the courts should start from a position of deferring to that finding. Because, you know, judges aren’t scientists, economists, &c., whereas the guys working for these agencies generally are).
February - Corner Post. Statute of limitations and accrual of claims under the APA. Pretty technical. - Ohio v. EPA. Another attempt to nuke the EPA from orbit - NetChoice. This is two joined cases, where Paxton and Florida are trying to force Facebook to not be allowed to block conservatives from spreading outright lies. (Basically, are Facebook and Twitter and their ilk “the public square” and not allowed to moderate)
March - Murthy. Related to NetChoice, except addressing whether the government is allowed to even very politely and diffidently ask that dangerously untrue content, like vaccine 5G injections or drinking horse paste or shoving bleach up your rectum, be removed from the algo. - San Carlos Apache Tribe. Addresses an edge case for the Indian Health Service’s support of the various tribes.
April - Snyder. Does a bribery charge require that there be an explicit, written, signed in blood agreement to take specific actions in exchange for a specific payment to a politician or person. - Fischer. This is the J6 case asking whether “obstruction” includes things like “counting electoral votes”, or is the crime of obstruction limited only to investigations and evidence. - Grants Pass v. Johnson. Does the enforcement, against the homeless, of general laws or regulations regarding camping on public property violate the 8th amendment cruelats and unusual punishment prohibition. - Moyle. The Idaho abortion case; does the federal EMTLA statute preempt Idaho’s “YOU WILL DIE FOR YOUR RAPIST’S BABY, YOU W****” law - Trump v. US. Specifically, the Trump v. US Immunity case
That’s a lot.
I wonder if the lack of decisions in some of these cases may betray a three-way ideological split on the court that makes it impossible to write a true majority opinion?
Something like Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson off in one corner saying “actually we shouldn’t burn it all down for no reason,” Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barret in the other chanting “NO CHEVRON DEFERENCE! NO WOMEN’S RIGHTS! BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN, GIL-E-AD, GIL-E-AD!” while Roberts and Gorsuch are sitting in the middle asking both sides “won’t one of you just sign on to this opinion that only burns it down a little bit? We’d like to go home to our nice comfy lives as wealthy white men who aren’t affected by any of this, please.”
I bet I can guess the outcome of Snyder based on the number of undisclosed gifts each justice has taken then conveniently remembered when it gets reported.
