In a Scathing Dissent, Sonia Sotomayor Calls Out the Conservative Justices’ Hypocrisy

5 months ago 66

SHIRIN ALI and BRADEN GOYETTE,    -  Slate Stephan: Today, Clarence Thomas wrote the Supreme Court majority decision for Garland v. Cargill. No surprise, the majority was made up of the corrupt christofascist cabal that now controls one of the three branches of the U.S. government. It is a decision that I predict is going to result in a significant increase in gun murders. It once again makes bump stocks, a device that turns an ordinary AR-15 into a machine gun, legal. I think you are going to see gangs, mentally ill individuals, and White nationalist terrorists using this device and the result will be increased death. Thomas' commentary on the majority decision is so stupid and factually wrong that I find it hard to believe any judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice, could write something like this. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing for the the three women of the minority in her commentary makes this very clear. Anyone who know anything about guns knows what bump stocks are and what they do. So, I suspect there is another issue underneath Thomas' commentary. Maybe it is about supporting the civil violence that I believe will occur if criminal Trump loses. As I said though one thing is sure, there are going to be more gun deaths. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong / Getty / supremecourt.gov. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is calling bullshit on her conservative colleagues’ rationale for throwing out a 2018 ban on bump stocks, the device used to modify the gun used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting—the deadliest in modern U.S. history. The Trump administration reclassified guns with bump stocks as machine guns, thereby banning the device’s use under a 1934 law that heavily restricts access to machine guns. In Sotomayor’s dissent in Garland v. Cargill, which Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan joined, she called out how her conservative colleagues had basically bent over backwards to redefine the legal definition of a “machine gun.” She noted that these linguistic gymnastics  are particularly galling given how much conservative jurists claim to prize textualism—a theory that stresses adhering closely to the plain text of the law and to the ordinary meaning of words. To drive the point home, Sotomayor came with receipts: She quoted past opinions where each one [...]


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