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Cruikshank, Gun Control, And Bad Rulings

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Index to posts in this series

We’ve looked at two early cases interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments, The Slaughterhouse Cases and US v. Cruikshank. These cases are still in force, and have done massive damage, to Black people especially and others who hoped to gain their rightful freedom; to the balance of power among the three branches of government; and to our jurisprudence. Recent 2nd Amendment cases are good examples of this damage.

Gun control

Recapitulation of the old cases. In The Slaughterhouse Cases the Supreme Court analyzes §1 of the 14th Amendment (text below). The second sentence bars states from abridging the privileges or immunities of “citizens of the United States”. The Court says this provision applies only to the tiny number of privileges or immunities that attach to people solely as citizens of the US. It doesn’t apply to their rights as citizens of a specific state.

The Court says that the !4th Amendment doesn’t change the relationship between state and federal governments. 83 US 77-78. It’s a negative argument: such a monumental change must be in very clear language, and this isn’t clear enough to suit the Court.

In Cruikshank, the Court examines the rights which the defendants allegedly illegally conspired to violate. One is the right to keep and bear arms for a lawful purpose. Here is the Cruikshank Court’s entire discussion of that issue.

The right there specified is that of ‘bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress. This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow-citizens of the rights it recognizes, to what is called, in The City of New York v. Miln, 11 Pet. 139, the ‘powers which relate to merely municipal legislation, or what was, perhaps, more properly called internal police,’ ‘not surrendered or restrained’ by the Constituton of the United States.

Citing several older cases, the Court says that the 2nd Amendment does not guarantee the right to keep and bear arms; all it does is bar the US from infringing on that right. It says that states can regulate the ownership of arms as part of their police power.

To summarize:
1. The 14th Amendment didn’t change the power relations between the state and federal governments.
2. Rights not specific to the Constitution are solely the domain of the states under their police power.
3. The 2nd Amendment does not grant any rights to anyone. It merely prohibits the US from infringing the right to bear arms.
4. Any important change in the laws or Constitution must be clear enough to suit the Supreme Court.

Current cases. Eventually the Supreme Court started applying the Bill of Rights to the states using the Due Process Clause. By the time Heller v. Dist. of Columbia was decided, most of the Bill of Rights had become more or less applicable to the states.

In Heller Scalia cites Cruikshank approvingly. He writes: “States, we said, were free to restrict or protect the right under their police powers.” He completely ignores the holding of Cruikshank and several older cases that the only function of the 2nd Amendment is to prohibit the US from infringing the right, as well as the holding that the right does not arise from the Constitution. He simply imposes his own textualist reading of the 2nd Amendment as if it were written today instead of 240 years ago.

A few years later in Macdonald v. City of Chicago Alito put SCOTUS in charge of controling state power over guns. The Seventh Circuit had upheld Chicago’s gun regulations, relying in part on Cruikshank. Alito says the issue is: “… whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is incorporated in the concept of due process,” an issue not considered by the lower courts. Cruikshank isn’t applicable because it only considered the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

Alito gives a short history of cases applying the Due Process Clause to the Bill of Rights starting with this: “The constitutional Amendments adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War fundamentally altered our country’s federal system.” He doesn’t tell us what that change is, or how it applies to guns.

He cites Heller for the proposition that the 2nd Amendment creates a right to bear arms. Then he announces that the right to and bear arms is covered by the Due Process Clause. There isn’t really an explanation for this. Alito just says it’s, like, you know, fundamental to the concept of ordered liberty, amirite, for every American to carry a gun for “self-defense”. Like this guy.

Then in Bruen, Clarence Thomas says that the only allowable limits on the the right to keep and bear arms are those the states imposed prior to either 1789 or 1868. Whatever that right was, the states obviously regulated it under their police powers, but Thomas doen’t even mention Cruikshank and The Slaughterhouse Cases. I guess Macdonald says it was unconstitutional for states to regulate guns after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, even though they had that right under Cruikshank and used it for 130 years.

Conclusion. The end result is that we can only regulate guns if five members of the NRA Court permit it. And now we learn that Bruen didn’t slake the blood lust of Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. They want to flood the country with ghost guns.

Why Not Overrule Those Old Cases?

I think one reason SCOTUS doesn’t overrule Cruikshank and The Slaughterhouse Cases is that it would change our understanding of our dual sovereignty system. In The Slaughterhouse Cases the Court said that a broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment “…would constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights, as they existed at the time of the adoption of this amendment.” Of course SCOTUS is already doing that, as in gun regulation cases.

But if we dropped the pretense that the states are the dominant power in deciding the rights of citizens, SCOTUS would lose one of its go-to arguments against federal laws it doesn’t like. Dobbs, for example, says that the right to abortion should be decided by the states. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act offends the dignity of the states (no, really), according to Shelby County v. Holder. And in NFIB v. Sebelius, SCOTUS says that the US can’t pressure the states to provide Medicaid to all their citizens, who, I note, are also citizens of the US, because state dignity is so important to suffering people.

There’s another possibility. The right-wing six simply don’t care about any of the traditional pillars of jurisprudence, such as stability, deference to the other branches, institutional reputation, and procedural constraints on power. And they’re careless. They don’t even try to be coherent or to clean up the loose ends of precedent that held for 150 years, or to create workable rules. See part IIIB of Breyer’s dissent in Heller and the dangers to society created by Bruen, as in the Rahimi case.

It’s bad enough that we’re goverened by five or six unelected lawyers. It’s worse that tbese second-rate people do such shoddy work.

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Section 1 of the 14th Amendment

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

SCOTUS Is Wrecking The Societal Safety Net

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The right-wing wrecking crew on SCOTUS is destroying the safety and security that make it possible to live in our society. They oppose governmental power when it’s used to protect us from guns and disease, and they strike at rights people need to participate fully in our complex capitalist society.

The Constitution doesn’t give SCOTUS the power to make these decisions. An earlier version of SCOTUS arrogated the power of judicial review to itself. Whereas the other branches have to justify their exercise of power by reference to the Constitution, SCOTUS justifies its power by pointing to an ancient precedent set by itself. For a discussion of this history and a defense of judicial review, see this article by Erwin Chemerinsky in The American Prospect.

To defuse protest against this power grab, for a long time SCOTUS exercised its power sparingly, and only in egregious cases. Perhaps the first instance of overreach was Dred Scott, which was reversed by the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments.

When SCOTUS got out of control in the 1930s, striking down New Deal legislation repeatedly, the other branches took aggressive action to protect their Constitutional powers.

In the 1970s conservatives and radicals rebelled against the Civil Rights cases and other changes wrought by the Warren and Burger Courts. In response, Republicans stacked SCOTUS with right-wing ideologues who have now run amok.

When I say “run amok”, I mean that all of the important decisions of the six SCOTUS right-wingers ignore the interests we all share in living in a safe and secure environment. It’s as if they believe that, as Margaret Thatcher put it, there is no such thing as society. Worse, the individuals affected by the outcomes are never heard, and the decisions only recognize the interests of a tiny minority. This post is focused on gun cases, but there are others equally vile.

New York State Rifle And Pistol Ass’n. Inc. v. Bruen holds that no restriction on the ownership of guns is Constitutional unless “… it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The Holy Six bluntly tell us we can’t protect ourselves from the climate of fear created by today’s weaponry.

In US v. Perez-Gallan, the defendant was charged with carrying a gun while subject to two court orders barring such possession. The District Judge, David Counts, held that there weren’t laws barring people subject to domestic abuse protective orders from having guns in 1792; therefore that can’t be Constitutional today.

In Cargill v. Garland, the 5th Circuit en banc ruled 13–3 to invalidate an ATF regulation banning bump stocks. It claims that a firearm equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun within the statutory definition, so the ATF regulation banning them is not within its statutory power. There’s a conflict among the Circuits, so the SCOTUS death panel has the opportunity to promote murder by machine-gun equivalents.

It’s worth noting that John Roberts demands governmental protection for all these judges to insulate them from the dangers they create.

None of the endangered parties are before these courts. Perez-Gallan’s ex-wife isn’t there. In the bump-stock case none of the people murdered in Las Vegas are there, nor are their families and friends, or the people who ran or cowered in fear. None of us normal people from Chicago testified about the impact of guns on our lives after months of deadly violence, car-jackings, road-rage shootings, and mass killings like the attack on the Highland Park Fourth Of July Parade.

So who was present? Well, in Bruen the Appellants are the New York State Rifle and Pistol Assn, and a couple of losers who don’t qualify for a concealed carry permit under New York law. In Cargill, the Appellant is a gun nut who turned in several bump stocks and then sued. Perez-Gallan is a truck driver who is subject to a domestic abuse protective order from Kentucky barring him from gun ownership and a separate order barring possession of guns while released on an assault charge. In each case, the opposing parties are government officials.

In other words, murder-neutral courts make these decisions in a bubble, where the only parties are government officials and gun fanatics.

Now I’m sure that the defenders of these laws and their lawyers are dedicated, hard-working, and skilled. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that courts are free to decide societal questions without regard to the specific tangible concerns of the people whose lives are at stake in these cases. After Bruen, the interests of normal people are irrelevant. Only the interests of gun fanatics are relevant. Courts, parties, and lawyers don’t have to look at the coffins of the dead, or the scars of the damaged. They don’t have to consider the psychological impact of shattered bodies on the families of the dead and wounded. They are instructed to ignore the consequences of their decisions. They pretend it’s all just words in a game of legal Scrabble.

They can also ignore the purposes of the Constitution, set out in the Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

These decisions don’t insure domestic tranquility, they don’t promote the general welfare, and they don’t secure the blessings of liberty for the vast majority.

Instead, they insure domestic violence and homicide. They insure that none of us can go to a Church, a grocery store, a concert, or a Fourth of July parade without fear of being shot. They endanger the lives and liberty of every last one of us.
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Photo by Arvell Dorsey Jr. via Flickr.