Monthly Archives: July 2022

TOPEKA Independent governor candidate Dennis Pyle attended a Topeka gun show in a quest to gather some of the 5,000 petition signatures necessary to secure a spot on the November general election ballot.

The idea was to mine the assemblage of Second Amendment advocates for people open to Pyles decision to step away from the Republican Party to offer Kansas voters an alternative to presumptive GOP gubernatorial nominee Derek Schmidt. Pyle, a state senator from Hiawatha since 2005, would join Schmidt, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Libertarian Party nominee Seth Cordell on statewide ballots.

Pyle has until noon Aug. 1 one day before the primary election to accumulate sufficient signatures to qualify. His movements on the GOPs right flank have drawn interest from Republicans and Democrats intrigued by the idea of Pyle being a wildcard in the three-month race to a finish Nov. 8.

His presence mirrors a belief among some Republicans that Schmidt didnt possess sufficiently staunch conservative views they wanted in a governor candidate.

Were working hard and diligently on the petition drive and everyone will find out the results on August 1, Pyle said.

Pyle wasnt the only person looking for petition signatures at the July gun show. State Rep. Vic Miller, a Topeka Democrat, also worked the crowd for signatures that could be added to Pyles pile. Miller wouldnt say how many he netted, but promised to turn over his signature sheets to the Pyle campaign.

It was more than a one-person job given the traffic. It went well, Miller said. There were a lot of people who didnt care for Derek Schmidt, because hes pretty much a waffler. As opposed to Pyle, who is a man of principle. I like Dennis.

The political sideshow at the firearm gathering brought together an unusual pairing, given Pyles persistently conservative approach in the Legislature and Millers dedication to Democratic politics in the Capitol. After Kelly was sworn into office as governor in 2019, Miller surrendered his House seat after selected by peers to complete the unexpired portion of Kellys Senate term. He later chose to return to House in 2021.

Larry Mzhickteno, who was a neighbor of Miller for more than a dozen years, said he was surprised to see Miller at the gun show. He said Miller was wearing a National Rifle Association hat and held a signature sheet with about 15 names on it. The goal of Miller and other Democrats was obvious, he said.

I think theyre trying to divide the number of votes Schmidt can get, Mzhickteno said. He was being awfully sneaky about it.

In a June announcement, Pyle said he was interested in entering the governors race to give voters of Kansas a diverse choice. He said he was a God-loving American, devoted to the Constitution and protecting our children.

Pyles appeal to voters could be important, especially if the Kelly and Schmidt race came down to the wire. In 2010, Pyle landed more than 31,000 votes in a Republican primary loss to U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, who served Kansas 2nd District in Congress for a decade.

C.J. Grover, Schmidts campaign manager, said Kellys inability to defend her record as governor led her allies under false pretenses to trick voters into adding a candidate to the ballot in hopes of splitting the vote enough to deliver her a win despite a majority of Kansans wanting a different governor.

Shannon Pahls, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, said acceptance by Pyle of petition signatures gathered by Miller or other Democrats would raise questions about Pyles adherence to conservative principles. She previously said a vote for Pyle in the 2022 election should be considered a vote for Kelly.

If Dennis Pyle has any integrity, he will reject all petition signatures gathered on his behalf by liberal Democrats helping Laura Kelly. The Kansas GOP calls on him to both reject them and make a public commitment that he will do so, Pahls said.

Kansas Democratic Party spokesperson Emma OBrien responded to Pyles announcement of interest in the governors race by suggesting his candidacy reflected Schmidts internal partisan problems and Kellys bipartisan work as a unifying leader.

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Pyle pushes ahead with hunt for 5K signatures to join November ballot in Kansas governor's race - Kansas Reflector

Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images)

Since Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 2020, its fate has languished in courts and on the congressional cutting room floor. But its neither the legislative nor the executive nor the judiciary that hold the fate of constitutional gender equality; in fact, the ERA needs just one more signature to take effect. The would-be 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is waiting for the National Archivist to certify and publish those 24 words as a new amendment to the Constitution.

The National Archivist? Like from the National Archives? Yes, exactly. Currently Debra Steidel Wall is the acting archivist at the archives. Unlike her predecessor David S. Ferriero, who blocked the ERA certification, Steidel Wall has the opportunity to make history.

The constitutional amendment process is rather straightforward: An amendment must be passed by two-thirds in both houses of Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the states (38 currently). There are no other steps. The president doesnt even have to sign it. If youre a strict originalist, thats it for the amendment process, Kate Kelly, lawyer, ERA advocate, and author of Ordinary Equality: The Fearless Women and Queer People Who Shaped the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Rights Amendment, explained to Jezebel. Its a states rights issue.

However, Congress added a statutory requirement, and this is where we return to Steidel Wall. The archivist certifies that the states who ratified it ratified it and publishes it. Thats the way for everyone to know that when you print new versions of the Constitution it has 28 amendments, Kelly said. Its a purely ministerial duty. The archivist was never intended to be an arbiter.

In fact, the amendment process is supposed to stay in the hands of those who are democratically elected. The archivist is only confirmed by the Senate and reports to constituency. Article V of the Constitution gives no roles to the courts or executive branches in text.

Because of this, the archivist has been sued by Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. A federal district court dismissed the suit, but its appeal is pending at the D.C. Court of Appeals. Since then, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (a Republican) pulled out of the lawsuit. The lawsuit was dismissed because the states passed the ERA after the 1982 deadline given by Congress. But that deadline only applied to the preamble of the ERA, Kelly said.

Despite this back-and-forth, leading constitutional scholars like Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School told Congress that the ERA is the 28th Amendment.The 24 words that would add gender equality to the Constitution and were ratified by 38 states do not include the deadline.

The states shouldnt have to be beholden to a congressional deadline, Kelly said. There are no deadlines attached to the constitution amendment process [in Article V], she said. There are a lot of deadlines in the Constitution, a census every 10 years for example. If the framers intended to put in a deadline, they would have. The time limit was not something they considered. I think its pretty clear that the deadline is not binding.

The time for constitutional protections for gender have never been more urgent. We will not have permanent protections if we are not in the Constitution, Kelly said. Losing access to abortion as a fundamental right illustrates the vital importance of changing the Constitution. Protections we treated as permanent are not permanent.

But for Kelly, who first learned about the ERA when her mother and grandmother were organizing against it in the 1970s at the behest of the Mormon Church, the ERA represents a long game and a systemic solution.

When you think about amendments, the people who wrote and ratified the Second Amendment never imagined how powerful it would become. They have become incredibly powerful tools and we dont have that for gender. We need to step back and dream as big as we can, she said. It will also outlast every person on the Supreme Court. Its gonna be here in 200 years, 300 years, assuming we still have a democracy by then. It is a permanent amendment.

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The Equal Rights Amendment Just Needs One More Signature - Jezebel

On July 11, Joe Biden held an event at the White House to celebrate what his administration called the most significant gun violence legislation to have been signed into law in 30 years.

The ink on the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed over the NRAs objection, is barely dry. And the same can be said for the U.S. Supreme Courts latest pronouncement on the Second Amendment, which reinforces the principle that the right to keep and bear arms is a defining feature of American freedom and self-governance.

And yet news is now breaking that Congressional Democrats are pushing the largest firearms ban in American history.

This demonstrates as clearly as possible that gun control advocates will never stop, that every success merely emboldens them to take the next, more sweeping and tyrannical step, and that any legislator or voter who thinks otherwise is dangerously nave.

The bill H.R. 1808, sponsored by Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-RI) is scheduled for a markup in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and suffers every major defect attributable to Congressional guncontrollegislation.

First, it is blatantly unconstitutional.

Second, it would provide no appreciable benefit to public safety, while directly infringing on the rights of law-abiding Americans. Its most predictable effect would be to put the law on the side of predatory criminals and against ordinary people peaceably trying to live their lives.

Third, it is punitive, persecutory, divisive, and wholly partisan.

There are many things Congress could do in good faith within its constitutionally delegated powers to address the problems of violent crime and violent criminals. This bill does none of them.

Heres what it would do.

The centerpiece of the bill is a sweeping ban on semi-automatic long guns (what it calls assault weapons), targeting what are in fact the most popular rifles in America today.

It would ban the importation, manufacture, sale, transfer, or possession of any semi-automatic rifle that has a removable magazine and any one of the following features: a pistol grip; a forward grip; a folding, telescoping, or detachable stock (or some feature that makes the firearm otherwise foldable or adjustable in a manner that operates to reduce the length, size, or any other dimension, or otherwise enhances the concealability, of the weapon); a grenade launcher; a barrel shroud; or a threaded barrel.

It would also ban any semi-automatic rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds, except for an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.

The bill underscores its intentions with a lengthy list of firearms that are banned by name, which include all AK types and all AR types, as well as copies, duplicates, variants, or altered facsimiles with the capability of any such weapon thereof.

Semi-automatic shotguns and pistols, of course, also get their own types of bans.

Even more consequentially, however, the bill would ban any ammunition feeding device that has an overall capacity of, or that can be readily restored, changed, or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition, excluding only an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.

Also banned by the bill would be any part, combination of parts, component, device, attachment, or accessory that is designed or functions to accelerate the rate of fire of a semiautomatic firearm but not convert the semiautomatic firearm into a machinegun.

Moreover, any combination of parts from which a [banned] firearm [could] be assembled or the frame or receiver of a [banned] rifle or shotgun would themselves be banned.

The consequences of these bans are literally too encompassing and far-reaching to analyze in depth in a general overview of the measure.

Suffice to say for present purposes that despite the bills use of the term assault weapon it does not target obscure firearms, firearms that are favored by criminals but not law-abiding citizens, firearms that are over-represented in crime, or firearms that are fielded by modern military forces. Rather, it goes after the very types of rifles, in particular, that are most often chosen by Americans for defense of their homes, their families, and their properties.

Thus, the first defect of the bill is that it violates the Second Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that the Second Amendment protects firearms in common use for lawful purposes, most recently on June 23 in its opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen.

There is no question that the AR-15 and other semi-automatic firearms and magazines targeted by this bill meet the common use threshold.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the leading trade association for the U.S. firearms and ammunition industries, reports that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 are among the most popular firearms being sold today. As of late 2020, NSSF estimated (based on import and manufacturing data dating back to the 1990s) that there were 19.8 million of these types of rifles in circulation in the United States.

Moreover, the overwhelming number of semi-automatic rifles and pistols chambered for a defensive cartridge and available in the U.S. today come factory-equipped with magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. There also countless such aftermarket magazines in private hands.

Under any conceivable definition, both items are in common use.

The author of Bruen himself, Justice Clarence Thomas, has in fact already opined on the matter in a dissent to the high courts refusal to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a ban on AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles in 2015. Thomas wrote:

[District of Columbia] v. Heller asks whether the law bans types of firearms commonly used for a lawful purposeregardless of whether alternatives exist. The Citys ban is thus highly suspect because it broadly prohibits common semiautomatic firearms used for lawful purposes. Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles. The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons. [Internal citations omitted.]

Another current justice, Brett Kavanaugh, while a judge on the D.C. Circuit, dissented from a case that upheld a Second Amendment challenge to a similar ban. Under the Heller history- and tradition-based test, or the strict scrutiny test, or even the majority opinions own intermediate scrutiny test, the D.C. ban on semi-automatic rifles is unconstitutional, Kavanaugh wrote.

Still another current justice, Samuel Alito, wrote a concurring opinion to a Supreme Court case which concerned stun guns. Citing data that indicated some 200,000 Americans owned stun guns as of 2009, Alito opined: While less popular than handguns, stun guns are widely owned and accepted as a legitimate means of self-defense across the country. Massachusetts categorical ban of such weapons therefore violates the Second Amendment. This same rationale would apply even more strongly in the case of AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles, which are vastly more common.

Bruen also clarified that gun control laws run afoul of the Second Amendment unless a similar legal tradition existed in America at the time the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment was ratified. Certainly, there was no legal tradition in the states during either period of banning ANY sort of rifle.

Beyond the clearly unconstitutional provisions of H.R. 1808, it is also bad policy.

Far from the choice of criminals, rifles of any type are actually under-represented among the firearms used to commit murder in the United States. FBI statistics consistently bear this out, year after year demonstrating that handguns (which the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller ruled cannot be banned just because they are potentially dangerous) are far and away the crime gun of choice.

Rifles fall not just below handguns as weapons used in murder but below non-firearm weapons as well. This includes not just edged weapons, like knives, or blunt-force weapons, such as clubs or bats, but even so-called personal weapons like hands, fists, and feet.

Even the decidedly anti-gun fact-checkers Politifact could not evade this simple truth. While straining to emphasize the point that firearms, generally, are the most commonly used weapons to commit murder in the U.S., the article had to admit: A Facebook post claimed that more people were killed by hands, fists and feet in 2020 than by rifles. FBI data does confirm that statistic.

Rigorous research also consistently fails to support any crime control benefits for bans of the type in Cicillines bill.

This was true of congressionally-mandated studies that followed the first nationwide experiment with categorically banning certain types of semi-automatic firearms and large capacity magazines from 1994 to 2004. The first such study concluded: At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders. A follow-up study likewise acknowledged: the bans impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.

More recently, the RAND Corporation conducted a comprehensive survey of existing, high quality literature on the effects of various gun control measures. That effort was unable to substantiate any convincing evidence that magazine capacity limits or bans on categories of semi-automatic firearms have a beneficial effect on reducing violent crime generally or mass shootings in particular.

But, of course, crime control is not the point of H.R. 1808.

The most benign thing that could be said of it is that its a cynical attempt to appear pro-active to partisans and uninformed voters who understand neither firearms nor the dynamics of violent crime in the United States.

Gun control advocates of all stripes will occasionally admit that banning certain semi-automatic firearms is symbolic at best. Lois Beckett delivered this bad news to her fellow liberals in articles in The New York Times and Mother Jones.

UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler, often cited in anti-gun propaganda as a subject matter expert, agreed in an interview with Vice:

My own view is that there's no way to make assault rifle bans effective. It's an ineffective law, it's an ineffective goal, it's an ineffective policy that's mostly about symbolism and not about substance. The truth is assault weapons are used very infrequently in crimes. I think there is a grand total of about 300 people a year who die from rifles of any sortassault or otherwise.

Even an article in the hard-left Cardozo Law Review argued, banning assault weapons is pointless and distracts attention from other gun control initiatives.

Perhaps the most revealing discussion of the issue, however, came from the late Charles Krauthammer, generally considered a conservative pundit but one who supported firearm prohibition. Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquility of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain, Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. He continued: Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic -- purely symbolic -- move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.

Krauthammer did not live to see the creeping authoritarianism that that has lately taken hold in these sister democracies, but he likely would have approved.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau purported to use executive authority to unilaterally ban huge categories of semi-automatic firearms in 2020, with current owners given amnesty to come into compliance by surrendering or deactivating their guns. As the deadline approached, Trudeaus government blinked at its own overreach and extended the amnesty period until October 30, 2023. Meanwhile, Trudeau has gone even further and begun pursuing a ban on the importation and transfer of handguns.

In England, where private ownership of guns is nearly extinct and arming oneself for personal defense is considered a crime, police conduct weapons sweep at public housing projects and proudly display the bizarre fruits of their efforts, which include such things scissors, pliers, files, and even a bicycle wheel.

Make no mistake, this is the bright future of domestic tranquility that awaits the U.S. itself if gun control advocates get their way. And however reluctant they usually are to admit it, every step they take in restricting firearm ownership is done with this end in mind.

That is exactly why Biden, on July 11, used the occasion of celebrating a supposedly breakthrough gun control law to call for a broad ban on semi-automatic firearms.

Now his party is trying to accommodate him.

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Never Enough: Congressional Democrats Ignore the Constitution and Reality to Push Futile Gun Ban - NRA ILA

Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Laurel Burchfield is the associate director of Mainstream Coalition, where she advocates for commonsense policy.

We believe fervently in the American Way, which stands for the separation of religion and state. Naturally, we are to live out our beliefs within the political state as private citizens, but we do not attempt to use the states political system to enforce our belief system upon our pluralistic neighbors. Bob Meneilly at The Village Church, Aug. 15, 1993

A popular phrase found on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and memes reads, If youre not angry, then youre not paying attention.

Well, everyone I know right now is angry as we continue to process recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court including the attack against reproductive rights with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the potential dismantling of LGBTQ equality coming down the pike based on Justice Clarence Thomas written concurrence, and the broadening interpretation of the Second Amendment and loosening of gun laws immediately following two mass shootings in New York and Texas. And thats just scratching the surface of things that we should all be angry about as the court repeatedly violates one of our most fundamental freedoms by shattering the wall between religion and government.

Were also scared, because for as much as the Supreme Court is taking this country into new and dangerous territory, we also have a roadmap for what comes next. Allow me to paint that picture for you:

There is no reason to believe that this conservative court made up of judges who are bringing their own religious beliefs to the bench will stop hearing, and ultimately ruling for, cases that chip away at the constitutional protection from the government establishment of religion.

Are you angry yet? Are you paying attention? Because this next part is important.

Every politician will tell you the same thing Kansans are practical people who want common sense policies for our state. The difference lies in what is considered common sense.

Do we want a state where, as Mainstream Coalition founder Bob Meneilly predicted nearly 30 years ago, religious extremists dictate what is good for everyone based narrowly on their religious beliefs? Or do we believe in the common sense principles of the separation of religion and government and in electing individuals who put Kansans interests before ideology and outside influence?

Now is the time to start asking candidates about their position on issues that matter to you, and to start holding them accountable for their words and actions.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary,here.

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Now is the time to sit up and pay attention, Kansans. What kind of state do we want? - Kansas Reflector

When Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court in 2020, conservatives celebrated that there are now four avowed originalists on the Court. To those on the right, the latest version of the Roberts Court had the potential to be the greatest originalist Court in history. But this terms biggest decisions show how wrong those conservatives wereeven as they got all the results they wanted.

Although conservative originalists have for years been touting their method as restrained, sensible, and tightly tethered to constitutional text and history, this term blew away such pretenses. If this is the great conservative originalism, then those professing it have finally and conclusively revealed it to be what many skeptics already considered it: a hollow edifice designed to hide an ugly and aggressive ideological agenda.

This is a radical Court dominated by conservatives who treat the past practices of state legislatures as determinative of the Constitutions meaning, warping the broadly worded language that was meant to enshrine fundamental principles of liberty and equality in our national charter. This is a Court that insists it is following history and tradition where they lead, while cherry-picking the history it cares about to reach conservative results. These are damning moves for conservative justices who pride themselves on fidelity to the Constitutions first principles.

Lets start with Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, where a five-justice majority overruled Roe v. Wade and, for the first time in history, stripped away a previously announced constitutional right essential to bodily integrity and equal citizenship. Dobbs offers one of the most crabbed views of liberty in Supreme Court history. Justice Samuel Alitos majority opinion presents liberty as an empty idea. According to Alito, liberty is a capacious term with hundreds of possible meanings. Because it could mean anything, Alito claimed, courts should be extremely loath to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution. Alitos stingy view of liberty is driven by his fear that courts will inevitably engage in freewheeling judicial policymaking in the guise of protecting liberty. The Dobbs majority turned to history and tradition to stop courts from safeguarding unenumerated fundamental rights, beginning with the right to abortion.

From the 1969 issue: The right of abortion

Alitos account of history and tradition ignores the most salient aspect of the Fourteenth Amendments history: the horrific abuses that led the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment to push through changes to the Constitution to broadly guarantee the protection of substantive fundamental rights. The through line from the abolitionist critiques of slavery to the debates over the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was the idea that slavery was built on the denial of bodily integrity, coerced reproduction and the rape of enslaved women, and the tearing apart of Black families. Alitos sweeping condemnation of unenumerated fundamental rights ignores the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment sought to guarantee rights to bodily integrity and to marry and raise a family, and the right to decide for oneself whether, when, and with whom to form a family.

In short, reproductive freedom is in the Constitution. Alito simply refuses to grapple with the Constitutions true history.

Instead, Alito relies heavily on state practice, insisting that because abortion was widely prohibited at the time of the Fourteenth Amendments ratification in 1868, state bans on abortion are constitutionally permissible. Since Brown v. Board of Education, arguments from state practice have been the go-to argument for those seeking to gut the Fourteenth Amendments promises of freedom and equal citizenship. Defenders of school-segregation laws, bans on interracial marriage, bans on abortion, sodomy laws, and bans on same-sex marriage argued that each of these practices was constitutional based on state legislative practice at the time of ratification. Alito draws on similar arguments to justify overruling Roe.

Alitos state-practice argument is wrong and deeply dangerous: The fundamental rights of Americans do not rise or fall depending on a head count of state practice in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment changed the Constitution to correct a long history of subordination and suppression of fundamental rights, not freeze into amber state practices of the day. But Alitos majority opinion shows no interest in understanding the Fourteenth Amendment. His project, despite his denials to the contrary, was to overrule Roe and provide a road map to strip away bedrock rights that the Court has protected for nearly a century, including rights to use contraceptives, enjoy sexual intimacy, and marry the loved one of ones choice, regardless of sexprotections that Justice Clarence Thomas, in his Dobbs concurrence, indicated he would take away.

In his account of state practice, Alito presents a slanted version of history, ignoring the fact that common law made abortion accessible early in pregnancy and whitewashing the illicit racist and sexist judgments baked into the campaign to prohibit abortion. When states moved to criminalize abortion beginning in the mid-19th century, it was based on the view, shared by the Supreme Court of that era, that a womans proper role was to bear and raise children, as well as racist fears that white Protestant women were flouting their maternal duties at a time when immigrant populations were expanding. This is hardly history that a Court concerned with the Fourteenth Amendments core commitments would defer to. Rather than grapple with it, Alito blithely dismisses it as irrelevant, allowing the dead hand of an unjust past to trump the majestic language inscribed in the Constitution.

Dobbs deployed selective history to take away a fundamental right; the 63 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen deployed selective history to create one: a radically expansive right to be armed in public. The most jaw-dropping aspect of Bruen is the newly minted test the conservative majority invented to adjudicate future challenges to gun-safety legislation. Instead of using the weighted interest-balancing approach that is the norm in constitutional law, the six conservatives insisted that the government must affirmatively prove that its firearm regulation is part of a historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms. As guns have proliferated, weapons have become more dangerous, and mass shootings have become an all-too-common occurrence, the 63 conservative majority insisted that new approaches to gun safety are constitutionally illegitimate. Going forward, only gun-safety laws that are backed by strong historical precedents are constitutionally permissible.

John A. Eterno: I was a police officer for 20 years. I know what it means to put guns on the street.

Bruen never explained why a past tradition of gun-safety regulationwritten at a time when firearms were less powerful than modern onesis hardwired into the Constitution. The Second Amendment may protect an individual right to bear arms, but nothing in its history freezes in place gun-safety regulations of the founding era. The 63 Court has invented a harsh test completely out of whack with the rest of constitutional law, which takes into account both rights and government interests. Nowhere else in constitutional law does the Supreme Court employ a test that is so shackled to historical practice.

Justice Thomass majority opinion in Bruen devoted virtually no space to canvassing the text and history of the Second Amendment. That is because nothing in history supports the idea that the government cannot enact reasonable gun regulations that respect the right to own a gun, while also protecting public safety. The problem is not the Constitution; it is the fact that the 63 conservative Court invented the idea that only gun-safety legislation with a strong historical backing is constitutionally permissible.

The Bruen majority promised that the government need only identify a well-established and representative historical analogue, not a historical twin, then spent the bulk of the opinion dismissing every single example of what Justice Stephen Breyers dissent called a 700-year Anglo-American tradition of regulating the public carriage of firearms in general, and concealed or concealable firearms in particular. The takeaway is that the conservative-majority Court will relentlessly manipulate history to find a way to strike down gun-safety legislation that it dislikes. Bruen is just the beginning.

In this terms religion cases, Carson v. Makin and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the 63 conservative majority dramatically expanded the protections of the free-exercise clause, without a whiff of attention to history and tradition, while whittling down the establishment clause in light of historical practice. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor trenchantly put it, The Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation. This emerges most starkly in Kennedy, where the conservative majority played fast and loose with both the factual record and the law to overturn the dismissal of a public-school football coach who was fired for leading students in prayers on the 50-yard line following his teams games. Dismissing huge swaths of prior establishment-clause doctrine as long abandoned, Justice Neil Gorsuchs majority opinion insisted that historical practices and understandings sharply limit separation of church and state principles. On Gorsuchs account, it was the school district who overstepped its authority, and the idea that Kennedys prayers might have coerced nonbelievers can be dismissed.

Adam Laats: The Supreme Court has ushered in a new era of religion at school

It is no coincidence that, in the same term that the 63 Court dismantled the right to abortion, it also rejected the notion that the government must act with a secular purpose and may not endorse religion. Where will the Courts disdain for the establishment clause go next? Kennedy raises the possibility that the conservative majority might allow official teacher-led prayers on the basis of historical practice of state-sanctioned prayers in public schools. Those who care about the religion clausesboth of themshould be gravely worried that the Court might enable state efforts that degrade from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authorityprecisely what James Madisons famous writings on freedom of conscience and religious equality warned against.

As these examples illustrate, history and tradition is the new calling card of a Supreme Court that is willing to upend our constitutional order in the name of traditionalism. Do not label the Roberts Court originalist, if that term is to have the methodological meaning its supporters have been advertising for years. It is not. It is a deeply unprincipled conservative Court majority that manipulates both the Constitution and history to reach conservative results, reversing rights it despises and supercharging those it reveres.

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Originalism Is the Supreme Courts Favorite Justification - The Atlantic