They keep handing Biden all the arguments he needs to win.
IS CAUSING great pain and upset to tens of millions of people, and it isn’t done yet. But in the end, by which I mean the day after the presidential election, America might owe the Court’s conservative supermajority a gracious thank-you note—“We couldn’t have done it without you!”—or even dinner.
The high court’s six conservative justices,half of them named by Donald Trump, could well be Joe Biden’s ticket to a second term. Like Trump himself, they are a scandal-and-controversy machine, constantly renewing old furors and creating new ones.
Democrats couldn’t ask for better material, or more of it. Whether the issue is abortion, guns, or the rule of law, and pondering if presidents are like kings and, if so, how much, there’s a ruling for that. Sometimes two or three. And if there isn’t yet, there will be soon.
The dramatic case that will first come to mind for most people is the Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision revoking the constitutional right to abortion access. But there is also its Bruen decision one day earlier gutting state regulation of firearms. There is the March 2024 decision neutering the Fourteenth Amendment that is supposed to bar insurrectionists and their enablers from running for or holding federal office. There is the opinion last month upholding racial gerrymandering. And there is the Court’s tortured reasoning in last week’s 6–3 decision to overturn a Trump-era ban on bump stocks.
The justices said a bump stock does not turn a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun because “it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger,” as the AP put it. Never mind that it uses a different mechanism to make the weapon operate exactly like a machine gun. The decision instantly reminded everyone of why the Trump-era ban was imposed in the first place: the 2017 mass shooting at a huge country music festival in Las Vegas. The shooter high in his hotel room fired over a thousand rounds in eleven minutes. He had twenty-three assault style guns in his room, fourteen of them with bump stocks. He killed sixty people and injured hundreds more.
This is a prime example of a recurring problem for Trump, his MAGA followers, and Republicans in general: The Court’s rulings mean that politically inconvenient and sometimes traumatic reminders keep surfacing.
