Trump and guns loom large as scandal-hit supreme court gets back to work
The US Supreme Court embarks on its next nine-month term on Monday
with public confidence in the court still reeling
following recent extreme rulings
compounded by the ethically dubious conduct of some justices.
As the new term begins, the dust cloud kicked up by controversial opinions delivered at the end of the last term has barely settled.
In particular, the July decision of the six-to-three rightwing majority to grant Donald Trump substantial #immunity from criminal prosecution for actions he carried out as president astonished even seasoned observers of the country’s top court.
“That ruling was shocking, it was a rip to the constitutional fabric, and it gave vast new power to presidents to break the law,”
Michael Waldman said at a recent webinar by the Brennan Center, the progressive thinktank, of which he is president.
Despite the ructions caused by its actions, the increasingly hard-right court shows no signs of reining itself in.
The first big case of the new term that will be addressed on Tuesday takes the justices back into the vexed area of #gun #controls.
The case, 💥Garland v VanDerStok💥, concerns “#ghost #guns”,
kits that can be assembled at home that are increasingly used to skirt around basic gun regulations
including serial numbers and federal background checks.
➡️The Biden administration imposed restrictions on ghost guns in 2022 that were promptly blocked by a lower court, sending the case to the supreme court for adjudication.
The case has potentially huge implications for gun control.
⚠️A decision that exempts ghost guns from basic regulations would punch a giant loophole in America’s already lax approach to firearms.
As it is, US courts are wrestling with chaos and confusion in the wake of recent supreme court gun rulings.
In his #Bruen judgment, the hard-right justice
🔥 #Clarence #Thomas invented a new rule that any handgun ban must comport with the country’s “history and tradition”
– a phrase which has set federal judges scrambling to try to make sense of it.
The ghost gun case has emerged out of the fifth circuit court of appeals,
which has the distinction of being the #most #rightwing appeals court in the US.
Six out of its 17 active judges were appointed by Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/06/trump-guns-us-supreme-court?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Minnesota Law Review and Giffords Law Center are excited to present the Fall 2023 Symposium, Aiming for Answers: Balancing Rights, Safety, and Justice in a Post-Bruen America. Through a multidisciplinary framework, this Symposium will focus on how lawyers, scholars, and historians can work within the NYSRPA v. Bruen framework to address gun violence across our country and lawreview - Minnesota Law Review
#Bruen could have been easily and rationally decided based on the precedents correctly set by #Heller and #McDonald.
As has been said, if it is not necessary to rule more expansively, it is necessary to NOT do so.
The Bruen Court majority, however, went completely off the rails and invented out of whole cloth a completely novel and unfounded new test of constitutionality, for what we can now see clearly was the sole purpose of applying it to any law they just don't like.
#Bruen has the bizarre distinction of being a case that was decided correctly, but on faulty reasoning that was clearly intentionally promulgated to give the #SCOTUS a flimsy and fallacious rationale for blocking virtually all laws which present novelty beyond the founding era.
What makes Bruen dangerous is not that it struck down "may issue" #CCW #RTKBA permitting, but that it did so on by claiming that all legislation is necessarily subject to an historical construction test. #USpol
AZcoigreach
Chuck Darwin
Andrew Shields
Heidi Li Feldman
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐