Yeah, they're deploying their well-practiced disingenuous shithead tactics on this one. At this point it's a close run thing between Alito and Thomas for who is the most despicable ideologue on the Supreme Court. Give the others some time to get settled in though.
'Sam Alito’s Deplorable Arguments for Letting Domestic Abusers Keep Their Guns'
The most notable aspect of the Rahimi arguments was its gauzy abstraction. Unlike some of the court’s recent cases in which there is no lower court record and thus no facts, Rahimi included a good deal of underlying factual information about the life and questionable times of one Zackey Rahimi, his months of reckless shooting-at-stuff, his threats, and his actual violence. Unlike the purely speculative harms that became the bulk of the case in, say, 303 Creative, the web designer case from last spring that didn’t even have parties on both sides of the decision to withhold professional services, Rahimi comes with actual facts.
A state court granted Rahimi’s then girlfriend and the mother of his child a restraining order in February 2020, after he dragged her into his car following an argument, then smashed her head on the dashboard, then shot at a bystander who had witnessed the assault. The court records show all this, and the proceedings below detail his subsequent five shootings in the span of several weeks that followed. Under a federal law, he was no longer allowed to have a gun. He kept his guns. The 5th Circuit panel that determined that, after Bruen, Rahimi couldn’t be deprived of his weapons, and that the law that did as much was unconstitutional on its face, sniffed merely that Rahimi, “while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees.” The Supreme Court thus inherited the problem of an unrepentant, armed domestic abuser who looks a lot like every other unrepentant armed domestic abuser, and its own recent jurisprudence that surely implies, Yeah, why not?
Yet with a handful of mild exceptions, the arguments at 1 First St. on Tuesday morning steered clear of old Zackey Rahimi. Only after Justice Samuel Alito implied that when a woman seeks a protective order in a domestic violence setting, the results tend to be “he said, she said” situations concluding in restraining orders against both parties, and only after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that there existed only a “very thin record” in the present case did it become necessary for the remaining justices to intervene with actual facts from the actual record. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett was forced to remind her colleagues, who were at that point just parroting gun industry talking points, Rahimi’s girlfriend “did submit a sworn affidavit giving quite a lot of detail about the various threats. It’s not like he just showed up and the judge said ‘Credible finding of violence.’ ”
But why stick to the facts when you can imagine better ones? So, despite the fact that Rahimi was not making a procedural argument about the unfairness of the civil restraining order process, both Alito and Thomas magicked up these objections. Despite the fact that there was a lower court’s finding that Rahimi was in fact a danger to his girlfriend and child, they coughed up hypotheticals that raised the issue of how generally unfair it is for courts to take away guns in a civil proceeding. As Thomas put it, “If this were a criminal proceeding, then you would have a determination of what you’re talking about—someone would be convicted of a crime, a felony assault, or something. But here you have something that’s anticipatory or predictive, where a civil court is making the determination.” Alito—unsurprisingly—fretted more about the rights of the poor beleaguered gun owner than the woman he terrorizes: “If the person [under the restraining order] thinks that he or she is in danger and wants to have a firearm, is that person’s only recourse to possess the firearm and take their chances if they get prosecuted?”
In other words, the inversion process is now fully realized. The MAGA justices not only invent records in cases that have no facts. They also ignore the record in the cases that actually have them. Why consider the implications of actual gun violence when you can live in the imaginary world of good guys with guns suffering the indignities of legal restrictions?
