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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I think it's important to emphasize just how terrible the facts in Rahimi were. I know all the gun rights groups have hated it since it first popped up on the radar a couple of years ago (notice how none of them filed amicus briefs in support of cert, and how at least one or two of them wrote briefs trying to convince the Court to rule on non-2A grounds).

It's really unfortunate that this is the gun case SCOTUS decided to actually take: the case with an absolute scumbag plaintiff who should be in prison and a public defender who was simply trying anything he could to help his client rather than an activist team who planned the challenge from the ground up and actually know what they're doing. It's especially odd/frustrating that SCOTUS took this one because they couldn't even provide a single coherent statement of the law. Fractured 7-separate-opinion decisions are never looked kindly upon by posterity.

The Supreme Court took this case because they wanted to backpedal on guns. Except for Thomas, they do not want ordinary people to be able to go into a gun shop, buy a gun, strap it to their waist or put it on a sling, and go into a major city locked and loaded. To the other conservatives, the legal arguments are just a high-status game they're well-compensated for playing; they don't want them to make a difference on the ground because it's viscerally obvious to them that gun control is good.

Note there's another landmark case which had an absolute scumbag plaintiff. That's Miranda v. Arizona. In that one, the Warren court DID want their decision to make a difference on the ground. So they took a case with a bad plaintiff and said "See, even this asshole gets his constitutional rights". The Roberts court won't do such a thing.

Yeah, the guy is legitimately terrible, and this is essentially the best possible case for those in favor of gun control.

I'm not sure how broad the implications are. The court only ruled that the statute was fine in some applications, not necessarily in general, and they didn't really address due process questions, as they weren't asked to. (Or, as Thomas pointed out, the commerce clause, but I wouldn't expect Roberts and Kavanaugh to be willing to start radically curtailing the extent of the commerce clause to what it actually means). It's entirely possible that we see more cases on the exact same provision.

It's entirely possible that we see more cases on the exact same provision.

Much of the frustration here is that we've had years of better cases on the exact same provision, and Gorsuch didn't even write a dissent from denial of cert. There's some firearms people who are really hoping that SCOTUS just wanted to have a Bad Guys Can't Own Guns case first, but it's very hard to see that as anything but copium, and I don't think even the copium will survive either if Range (where the lower court found that a complete ban on possession for a 95 conviction for food stamp fraud was found unconstitutional) gets GVR'd with a dissent this week or the next.

I think maybe this opinion leaves a "Second Amendment +" case, where someone brings a 'normal' right case that also includes gun ownership, and gets more deference than they would under the traditional guns-are-always-a-compelling-interest bullshit, a la Caniglia, but Roberts' decision is just way too permissive in its writing, and I don't see it allowing any meaningful circuit split to develop for them to review with the text it just handed the coastal circuits, and the court will always have an excuse without a circuit split.

Mai is settled law, today; Roberts just saved himself from having to write the opinion.

((EDIT : And today's social media censorship case dodging any substantiative questions by complaining that the plaintiffs didn't bring a time machine to prove standing, and the leak of a similar punt for the EMTALA case, point the same direction, point similar directions.))

I don't think even the copium will survive either if Range (where the lower court found that a complete ban on possession for a 95 conviction for food stamp fraud was found unconstitutional) gets GVR'd with a dissent this week or the next.

Called it, at least on the GVR. We'll see how the copium goes.

It's entirely possible that we see more cases on the exact same provision.

The court has a way of handling those: cert denied. If the Fifth Circuit actually gets defiant, they'll reverse the decisions without argument.