Come On, Party Boy
Kavanaugh just handed gun safety advocates the argument of a lifetime — and he doesn't even realize it.
It seems like a hundred years ago instead of two weeks when I took the victory lap after Governor Spanberger signed 20 gun bills into law. While most of that legislation will hold — I think — one of the more significant pieces, the assault weapons ban, is now under full assault. First a rural judge in Virginia enjoined it. Then, last week, the DOJ sued to kill it outright. For gun safety advocates, the celebration may have been premature.
Trump’s goons are going to challenge all of it, because that’s what they do. As I said last week, this is headed to SCOTUS. And if history is any indication, the usual six louts won’t just strike down Virginia’s law — they’ll take the opportunity to gut every other state’s assault weapons ban still on the books. The guns-everywhere-for-everyone crowd may get exactly what they’ve wanted all along.
In a ruling that hints at what’s coming, the justices — on a vote closer than it should have been — upheld birthright citizenship, much to Trump’s chagrin. He’s not done fighting that one; he’s already directing his cult in Congress to find him a path to the outcome he wants. But buried in that ruling is something worth sitting with, because it’s going to matter a lot more than most people realize.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh made an extraordinary claim in his opinion: the Constitution’s meaning has effectively shifted because mass illegal immigration is, in his words, a “new circumstance” the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment never anticipated in 1868. He still landed on the side of upholding citizenship — he hung his actual vote on a federal statute, not that theory — but he floated the idea anyway. Circumstances change. The text has to bend to meet them.
Fine. Let’s use his own logic.
