Tainted Supreme Court Creates Political Victory with Bump Stocks
While the world waits for the make-or-break ruling regarding Trump's immunity, in another case, a Conservative Supreme Court Majority has rewritten the law to get to a specific political result.
After the October 2017, mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas killed 58 people and wounded more than 500, the Trump administration proposed an executive clarification on the definition of bump socks, which are “devices that can be attached to a semiautomatic firearm in place of a conventional gunstock, enabling it to fire bullets more rapidly.” In 2018, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) — an agency which had previously rejected the idea that bump stocks turned a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun — proposed and adopted a new rule that made bump stocks synonymous with machine guns, thus banning them.
Late Friday morning, the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court, created by Trump during his presidency, overturned this critical rule that banned the use of bump stocks, making it legal again for semi-automatic rifles to be converted into fully automatic guns. The 6-3 ruling was a consistent split along idealogical lines, whereby Conservative Justices ultimately arrived at a result that was tailor-made for gun enthusiast supporters of the Republican Party.
The majority opinion, was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who is currently under scrutiny for failing to disclose several luxury vacations and other gifts that were provided to him by billionaire Harlan Crow, the big money donor for conservative causes. Ultimately, Thomas arrived at his preferred political result in this ruling by saying that the definition ATF federal regulators meant to create by classifying bump stocks as machine guns went beyond the intention of Congress when it codified the ban nine decades ago.
You can read the entire opinion by clicking the link here:
Judges interpret the meaning of the US Constitution by using their reasoning skills to decide what particular laws mean when they rule on cases. There are seven widely accepted methods of interpretation that can be employed to shed light on the meaning of the US Constitution. Different judges typically rely on these different ways of dissecting the Constitution in order to glean intent and arrive at a decision. Pursuant to a great description from the National Constitution Center, here are the seven different ways in which judges will examine an issue to render a decision on the meaning of the US Constitution:
Text
A judge looks to the meaning of the words in the Constitution, relying on common understandings of what the words meant at the time the provision was added.History
A judge looks to the historical context of when a given provision was drafted and ratified to shed light on its meaning.Tradition
A judge looks to any laws, customs, and practices established after the framing and ratification of a given provision.Precedent
A judge applies rules established by precedents—taking rulings in old cases and applying them to new cases.Structure
A judge infers structural rules (power relationships between institutions, for instance) from the relationships specifically outlined in the Constitution.Prudence/ Consequences
A judge seeks to balance the costs and benefits of a particular ruling, including its consequences and any concerns about the limits of judicial power and competence.Natural Law/ Morality
A judge draws on principles of moral reasoning—whether embodied in the natural law tradition or drawn from a judge’s own independent, present-day moral judgments.
Conservative Justices, often called “strict constructionists” will typically limit themselves to the plain text of the law, and if that does not give them a clear answer, they will sometimes review the history or tradition aspects. A common argument made by Conservative politicians is that judges who tend to be more liberal will use all seven aspects of interpretation, and that allows them to create personally tailored law, rather than just following it.
In this ruling, Justice Thomas made a point to move far beyond the text of the law codified by Congress. His majority opinion included several intricate diagrams to help illustrate his final result which ultimately redefined the word “machine gun.” Thomas determined that bump stock devices are merely an aid, and don’t actually convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones, but simply reduce the time between shots.
Justice Thomas determined the following: “Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock. The firing cycle remains the same.” Thomas continued in his Conservative Majority opinion: “A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate ‘functions’ of the trigger. He continued, “A bump stock does not convert a semi automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does.” Now take a moment to re-read the seven accepted ways that a Justice will come to a conclusion.
There is no traditionally accepted analysis where a judge can redefine the entire meaning of a word based on breaking down the function of the object in question. In his ruling, Justice Thomas went so far outside of the traditionally accepted methods of Constitutional analysis that he redefined what a bump stock accessory is, and then reclassified the device so that it could be categorized outside of the “machine gun” classification.
Justice Thomas’ conclusion is not only ludicrous, he derived his intended political result thanks to a selective “interpretation” that until now has never existed. I could just as easily and reliably argue that a device that yields the same result as a machine gun and acts as a machine gun, is for all logical intents and purposes essentially a machine gun.
In her dissent, read aloud from the bench, Justice Sotomayor, makes a similar point by saying that Thomas and the Conservative majority are seizing on technicalities that put form over substance. “Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machinegun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose,” Sotomayor wrote. “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”
While it is easy to be outraged at a ruling that is so blatantly incorrect in analysis and result, it will sadly be innocent Americans who pay the price. Justice Sotomayor said it best in her dissent when she sad that “Today’s decision…will have deadly consequences.” I would take that a little further in saying that the real disaster comes from allowing a Supreme Court Justice to be courted and bought by influential men with deadly agendas.
Perhaps if Justice Thomas felt so compelled to include illustrations of how machine guns work to prove his flawed argument, Justice Sotomayor could just as easily have been driven to include graphic photographs of all of the slain people in Las Vegas to prove hers. Regardless, the next mass shooting in the US should be called the “Harlan Crow Massacre.”
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter, is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and an analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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Welp, let's see the SHERO Sundays line up all the extra mass murders (but almost never of anyone lawmakers care about) while the NRA and their Russian sponsors laugh at all the dead Americans. Screw the SCROTUS.
'tainted' doesn't quite satisfacorily describe SCOTUS