'Gun fetish fan fiction': Legal columnist on Clarence Thomas ruling redefining reality

A Slate legal analyst pointed to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' latest majority decision on Friday declaring the gun attachment bump stocks different from machine guns because the trigger must be depressed.

Speaking about the ruling on MSNBC, Dahlia Lithwick explained that there are two different stories. First there is the ruling. Second, she said, there is a determination of reality.

"I don't think there's any other way to read Clarence Thomas' page after page of, sort of, gun-fetish fan fiction," Lithwick explained. "He accompanied the [ruling] with photos and images and lots of substituting of his own understanding of how guns work for that of the ATF. It's their job to do this. It's his job to be a justice."

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However, she continued, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace was "saying really an essential thing, which is this is of a pattern we've seen over and over and over again, where justices take it upon themselves to decide what clean water is. What swamp land is. What is air pollution? What is a particle? What is COVID?"

The executive agencies that oversee such issues are staffed with experts in their fields, but in its attempt to decide on a ruling, "the justices can sort of read a quick tutorial and become experts on all things." And it "is really at the sort of [the] beating heart of what is so very scary about this opinion and so many others. It is a systemic effort to dismantle the administrative state as we know it and to substitute the ideas that justices get principally from amicus briefs from interested parties as truths."

She and Wallace discussed the two stories plaguing the court, one of which is an ethics concern, and the second is the fears of what they'll write into the legal framework of the United States through their docket.

On the former, Lithwick argued that people should not say that the "Supreme Court has an ethics problem, but that the United States has a Supreme Court problem."

Legal analyst and former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann remembered hearing from conservative lawyers eager to cast a ballot for Trump because they wanted a Supreme Court with "judicial restraint."

"For those people, I would say look at this decision. This is the complete antithesis of that," he said.

Watch the discussion in the video below or at the link here.

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