Monday, June 22, 2020

SCOTUS Gun Case Denials Signal Conservative Justices Don’t Trust Roberts With The Second Amendment

The fact that four justices who complained that the court needed to hear Second Amendment cases passed on 10 chances to do so tells us much about the court’s 'swing vote.'
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to pass on nearly a dozen gun-rights-related cases is breathtaking, not in the denial of hearing any, but in the seeming admission that the conservative associate justices think Chief Justice John Roberts can’t be trusted to protect the Bill of Rights.
The nation’s top court denied writ of certiorari to 10 cases. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry trade association, submitted amicus curiae briefs in two of those cases.
Those cases, Worman v. Healey and Mance v. Barr, centered on fundamental rights to acquire firearms to exercise the right to keep and bear arms. The Supreme Court’s denial lets stand Massachusetts’ ban on modern sporting rifles and a ban on the sale of handguns across state lines. The court also denied Pena v. Horan, a challenge to California’s Unsafe Handgun Act, which bans handguns in common use for lawful purposes.
The denial of writ of certiorari tells court-watchers the conservative associate justices don’t trust Roberts to uphold the liberties as written in the Bill of Rights
Enough to Call a Case, But They Don’t
The Supreme Court requires just four of the nine justices to agree to hear an appeal for the nation’s highest court to take the case. Those watching gun cases were hoping for good reason that finally, after a decade of silence from the court, the four votes were now there.
Four justices, including Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, have all recently expressed frustration with the court’s unwillingness to address infringements on Second Amendment rights. Thomas previously noted, “[T]he Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this Court.”
That pattern, disappointedly, hasn’t altered. In his dissent this week, Thomas again drew attention to this fact in the denial of certiorari in Rogers v Gurbir. “But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the Court simply looks the other way,” Thomas said.
Read the rest from Lawrence Keane HERE.

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