The Supreme Court backtracked somewhat on its expansionist treatment of gun rights — and en route to an 8-1 ruling Friday, some people on both sides of the debate were disparaged.
Even the government’s best Supreme Court lawyer – who won the case handily – was not safe. Nor was justice Clarence Thomaswho found himself alone on an island with a dissenting opinion.
The decision, which upheld a federal law banning suspected domestic abusers from owning guns, was a recalibration of a landmark 2022 ruling that upended — and expanded — Second Amendment rights. And despite the near consensus on the outcome, some judges showed sharp tongues.
Here’s a look at four telling statements in the Supreme Court’s latest gun rights decision:
Clarence Thomas is on his own
What a difference two years makes.
In June 2022, Thomas wrote on behalf of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, outlining a new approach to the Second Amendment. His in-depth opinion stated that modern gun control laws are invalid unless similar restrictions existed in early American history.
But on Friday, Thomas — the court’s oldest and longest-serving justice — stood alone in his dissent as all his colleagues decided lower courts had gone too far in his column. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, tried to minimize the disagreement with their colleague, but not all justices were so reticent, with two calling Thomas’ approach “useless.” Ouch.
Thomas’s strict view of history is far too ‘demanding’ Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote in accordance with Judge Elena Kagan. They likened it to an “overly sensitive alarm that sounds when a scheme did not exist in an essentially identical form at its inception.”
For his part, Thomas complained bitterly that his fellow judges were unwisely handing the government a “regulatory blank check.”
5th Circuit continues to get the L’s
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals – the most conservative appeals court in the country – was struck down again by the justices on Friday. The Supreme Court overturned the 5th Circuit’s 2023 ruling that declared the gun law in question unconstitutional, delivering an unusually direct rebuke to the justices.
“Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not intended to suggest a law trapped in amber,” the chief justice wrote.
“The Fifth Circuit made two errors,” Roberts continued. One of these was to require the government to provide a ‘historical twin’ to the provision linked to domestic violence. The other was to dwell on “hypothetical scenarios” not involved in the case, such as situations where someone was denied a gun because of an unwarranted restraining order.
“That error caused the panel to kill a stooge,” Roberts declared, even calling out a member of the appeals court — Trump appointee James Ho — for compounding the error.
The New Orleans-based appeals court, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas and has 12 Republican and five Democratic appointees, has been overruled by the Supreme Court in two other cases this year by lopsided margins. A 5th Circuit ruling cutting off funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was overturned 7-2, and the appeals court ruling reversing the availability of abortion pills was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court.
The Biden admin’s top SCOTUS lawyer is getting screwed
No doubt about it: Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar, who defended the gun control law on behalf of the Biden administration, won the case easily. But she was still sad after the entire court – all nine members – did their utmost to reject one of her arguments.
Prelogar appeared to mislead the justices last November when she claimed the government had the power to separate the responsible from the irresponsible when deciding who can have a gun.
“Congress can disarm those who are not law-abiding, responsible citizens,” Biden’s top lawyer said.
That did not go down well with the judges.
“We reject the government’s claim that Rahimi can be disarmed simply because he is not
‘responsible,’” Roberts wrote, referring to Zackey Rahimi, the Texas man whose case was before the court. “’Responsible’ is a vague term. It is unclear what such a rule would entail.”
Thomas’s dissent disagrees with the majority in many respects, but he commended the rest of the court for summarily rejecting Prelogar’s claim.
“No member of the Court adopts the government’s theory,” Thomas stated. “The administration’s argument lacks any basis in our precedents and would eviscerate the Second Amendment altogether.”
Zackey Rahimi gets a brutal reprimand
Roberts opened his 18-page op-ed with a detailed and chilling account of Rahimi’s actions, which seemed designed to underscore the extraordinary danger he posed.
Litigants seeking to expand rights often try to bring sympathetic cases to the Supreme Court. Rahimi’s is anything but the case, although it ended up in court when the Justice Department challenged the 5th Circuit’s ruling in his favor.
Roberts described at least six incidents in which the Texas native was suspected of firing a gun at people, including one during an altercation with his girlfriend and his shooting at the home of a man he considered “talking trash.” Other incidents included shooting at a car after a traffic accident, firing a gun at a truck that flashed its lights at him on the highway and shooting into the air at a roadside burger restaurant after his friend’s credit card had been refused.
Rahimi received a prison sentence of just over six years on a gun-related federal charge — a term he will now likely have to serve due to Friday’s Supreme Court ruling.
