SCOTUS Gives The Lie To Originalism

By issuing an opinion that is, for once, rational, the Supreme Court just provided us with a demonstration of the irrationality of “originalism.”

The same hard core of conservative Justices who only a week before, on the basis of a technicality, abandoned common sense or any concern for the consequences of their decision and put machine guns into the hands of civilians, the same Justices who have been claiming “shall not be infringed” means shall not be infringed, period, ruled that if a person is under a restraining order for domestic violence their right to bear arms can indeed be infringed.

Suddenly, “shall not be infringed” becomes “may be infringed when common sense so dictates.”

Suddenly, the law, per the Chief Justice, “is not trapped in amber.” In other words originalism is a farce.

Suddenly, infringing on the right to gun ownership has a “historic basis” and is “consistent with the second amendment.”

Historic? Well, yes. Historically, people with common sense have kept guns out of the hands of dangerous people. There is also Court precedent in an earlier similar case, but since when has precedent interfered with the agenda of this Court who scuttled 50 years of it in overturning Roe v Wade?

Consistent with the amendment? Read that amendment and tell me where it states guns can be withheld from dangerous people. It doesn’t, because the authors of the Constitution, unlike the Supreme Court majority, were men of the Enlightenment who assumed future Justices would be likewise enlightened and would apply common sense to the guidelines laid out in the text of their document.

After eschewing common sense in case after case, whoops! Suddenly Roberts and company employ it. Well, not all of them. Clownish Clarence, as would be expected, remained loyal to his employers.

In so doing, the judges who established their position on gun rights on a non- commonsensical, rigid interpretation of an outmoded, ambiguously written 18th century phrase, have now, probably unwittingly, established precedent. They could go back to many of their previous decisions on guns and other matters and reconsider them with logical commonsensical minds.

Not that they will.

They have demonstrated, nonetheless, that their use of originalism as the rationale for many of the dangerous and anti-democratic decisions they have made is a farce and a sham. It is but a cover for the real motive behind their toxic decisions, decisions that are not based in their fealty to the Constitution, but, rather, in their fealty to their ultra-conservative bias and benefactors.

No matter. This ship of fools, so thoroughly insulated from any accountability, will sail along their merry way. The corrupt crew will party on upon the main deck, enjoying their lavish lifestyles for years to come, while the ship of State sinks beneath the waves.