'Confirms our worst fears': Expert sounds the alarm over Supreme Court's 'freewheeling'
A Supreme Court watcher sounded the alarm on Thursday after the Supreme Court issued a ruling that the expert described as "freewheeling."
Mark Joseph Stern, a senior writer for Slate, argued in a new article that the Supreme Court's decision in Wolford v. Lopez, a gun rights case that arose out of Hawaii, was another "ad hoc nullification of any law that favors human life over the paranoid obsessions of gun enthusiasts."
"The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez on Thursday confirms our worst fears about the supermajority’s Second Amendment jurisprudence: It is a freewheeling policy project utterly unmoored from history that allows the Republican-appointed justices to implement their preferred gun laws under the thin guise of judicial review," Stern wrote.
The Wolford decision was one of several handed down by the Supreme Court on Thursday that alarmed some experts. In another opinion, the court sided with the Trump administration to strike down Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants, which some analysts described as "inhumane."
Stern noted that the Wolford decision seemed to follow the same track, as the Supreme Court appeared to be departing from precedent to rewrite American gun policy.
"These justices struck down Hawaii’s law restricting guns on private property not because the Constitution required them; to the contrary, the state proved beyond doubt that its statute was deeply rooted in history and tradition," he wrote. "Rather, the supermajority killed the law because it was offended that Hawaii would dare try to mitigate the violence that SCOTUS has unleashed through its radical, incoherent gun rights jurisprudence."
"There is no law to be found in Wolford. It reads not like the work of a court, but of a super-legislature imposing its ideological hostility to firearm regulations on a citizenry that never consented," he added.
