Month: March 2025

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this case.

It is difficult to actually conceive of how long the battle for our Second Amendment rights has been going on. It started in 1792 and has continued through tomorrow.

In the founding era, there were a number of racist and religious exceptions. These were designed to keep arms out of the hands of Negros, mixed race people, Indians, certain religions, and other deplorable. By the 1870s, all of these exceptions were found to be unconstitutional, leaving very few infringements that would survive constitutional muster.

At this time, temporarily denying the right to people that have been adjudicated violent in a court of law is the only one I know of. See: —Opinion, United States v. Rahimi, 602 S.Ct. ____ (U.S. 2024)

In the early 1900s, New York City decided to ignore the Constitution and passed the Sullivan Act. The Sullivan Act was designed to disarm those that would stand up to the corrupt bosses who controlled the city. They used a permitting system.

They claimed that this was constitutional because some people did get permits and everybody could beg for permission from the government for that permission slip. This continued until 2022, with the Bruen decision, the corrupt NYC permitting scheme was shutdown. For all of 10 seconds.

The Bruen response bill attempted to create a statewide “sensitive” places replacement.

After the Sullivan Act, the infringers decided to ban handguns, machine guns, and short shotguns. They did this by placing a tax on these guns that was so outrageous that The People could no longer afford them.

They did not accomplish this. What they got instead was a functional ban on Short Barreled Rifles, Short Barreled Shotguns, Machine guns, and Silencers. By 1936, this was the accepted law of the land.

Using a saying that had not yet been published, in the late 1960s the infringers took advantage of a crisis to stop mail order gun sales. The GCA of 1968 created FFLs and required in person sales of firearms.

The claim was that those FFLs wouldn’t sell to bad people.

When bad things kept happening, they tried more gun control. Mostly permitting schemes that made it nearly impossible for The People to get permission.

Using another crisis, they got the Brady Act passed. Thank goodness, the NRA was fighting for some level of a win. The original intention was to create a system where buyers would have to get permission from the government for any gun purchase.

This was in the form of a “background check” with no limit on how long it took or how intrusive it might be. The NRA got the NICS system for us. Along with a “not denied is proceed”. It put the onus on the government to complete the check rapidly.

In 1986, we got a win with a poison pill. This was the Firearms Owner Protection Act. This was designed to protect firearm owners from being persecuted by the ATF.

There was a time when describing the internal workings of a machine gun was being construed by the ATF as manufacturing a machine gun. Selling a gun or two could get you sent to prison for not having an FFL. It was bad. There are stories of ATF agents hanging around gun shows seeking people to arrest or FFLs to bust for trivial things.

The bad part of the Firearms Owner’s Protection Act was the Hughes Amendment. The infringers had realized that the NFA had outlived its usefulness.

In 1934, the $200 surcharge for transferring a machinegun was unreachable for most of The People. When a M3 machinegun was selling for under 30 dollars, $200 was nearly impossible. An ad for a Colt M16 shows a price of $236.00 plus $5.00 for shipping. By the mid-1980s, the price was around $1800.

At $1800, a $200 surcharge wasn’t as bad.

One of the problems that started happening after 1986, when the NFA was closed to new machineguns, was a price boost of $200 every time a NFA item changed hands.

Consider buying a silencer today. The can costs $500 + $200. If you want to sell the can, you would like to get $700, to recover your costs. Now, this doesn’t work. Given the choice of a used can for $700 + $200 tax or a new can for $500 + $200 tax, you buy new. Thus keeping the costs of silencer’s down.

After 1986, there were no new machineguns. This means that every transfer increases the cost of that gun by at least $200.

At this point, the infringers moved to stop the sale of all firearms. The method they decided on was to sue firearm retailers and manufacturers out of business.

What they did was they found a bloody victim and then sued the FFL that sold the gun. They knew they would not win the case, but the cost of litigation was punishment enough.

In 2005, bipartisan legislation was passed to stop this lawfare. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was designed to protect entities in the lawful commerce in arms from frivolous lawsuits.

And it worked.

Until Sandy Hook.

They sued Remington Arms because they owned Bushmaster who manufactured the rifle that the asshole used to murder children and teachers.

What they claimed was that Bushmaster produced ads that caused the asshole to decide to murder his mother. Steal her keys to the safe. Open the safe. Steal the AR-15 within. To drive the car he stole from his mother to the school. And there murder children and teachers.

It was all the fault of the manly man ads that Bushmaster used to sell guns.

The lower state court dismissed the case based on the PLCAA. It was appealed up to the Connecticut Supreme Court. They decided the case could move forward. That was appealed to the Supreme Court, who denied cert.

Remington was bleeding money, and this case didn’t help. They went bankrupt. The hull of the company had no assets and no people. The insurance companies were on the hook for the money involved in the suit.

They settled. No gun people were involved in that disaster. It was a purely money motivated decision.

Which brings us to this case. Sorry for this long history.

Mexico was approached by the usual suspects. They filed in Massachusetts claiming that all the gun manufacturers were causing horrible things in Mexico.

The argument goes something like this:

The Cartels get guns from an illegal gun dealer. That illegal gun dealer purchased that gun from an illegal gun smuggler. The illegal gun smuggler purchased the gun from a straw purchaser. The straw committed felonies when they filled out the 4473 and when they sold the gun. The FFL knows that some of the guns he sells are being sold to straw purchasers. The distributor knows that the retailer knows that he is selling some guns to straw purchasers. The manufacturer knows that they are selling to distributors that know that the FFL is selling some guns to straw purchasers.

Therefore, the gun manufacture is guilty of adding and abetting murder in Mexico.

Yeah, it is that bad.

The lawyer for the petitioners (good guys) gave his opening statement explaining this. He then stated that the path between crime and manufacture had too many intermediate steps to make them responsible. This is known as “proximate cause analysis”.

He didn’t say anything about PLCAA.

Thomas started the questioning. The conservatives asked the right types of questions.

Then Sotomayor stepped up to the plate. And asked good questions. Not great, but good.

After Gorsuch and Barrette, Kagan asked questions. Again, not great, but good.

Then the surprise of the day.

Jackson started asking questions. And her leading question was, “Why wasn’t this stopped by PLCAA?”

It was a Good question.

I’m looking forward to reading the court’s opinion. At this point, I am finding myself thinking that this maybe a 9-0 opinion.

Transcript of oral arguments in 23-1141

Not great music but it feels right after Z decided to FA and is now FO.

When I was in elementary school, the principal still had a paddle hanging on the wall behind him. The principal was the person that hired and fired teachers and all other staff at the school. They had significant power.

To quote Stan Lee, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Most principals did use their power responsibly. They used the power of the paddle to control their schools. They used the power to hire and fire to control their staff. And they did not abuse that power.

Unfortunately, when there are positions with great power, that power attracts people who are interested in power.

There was abuse. There were principals that abused the power of the paddle, taking it over that line. There were principals that hired and fired at a whim. Being a teacher had no stability.

The answer that was put into place was to remove the power of the paddle and the power to fire from principals.

Today, teachers are one of the most protected professions in the country. In my state, it is illegal for anybody to speak negatively of a teacher at a board meeting. You cannot say that a teacher is a bad teacher.

The only way that I could make that statement was to say my kids have Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones and Mr. Kilroy as teachers. Mr. Kilroy and Mrs. Smith do a fantastic job.

I had to leave “but Mrs. Jones sucks as a teacher” out. To say anything negative was forbidden.

Our president was given the job as chief executive. He was given the job of commander in chief. He is in charge of the executive branch.

This is stated in our Constitution, under Article II.

He delegates power to different people to oversee the executive branch.

Unfortunately, like those principles of times past, the power to fire somebody at will was abused by some.

To deal with that abuse, Congress stepped in and usurped the power and responsibility of the president. They did this by passing unconstitutional laws, which have not yet been struck down.

Our first highlight is almost constitutional. Where it fails is “for a term of 5 years”. Congress does not have the authority to set term limits for appointees. Appointees serve at the pleasure of the president.

Prior to Trump, this was never an issue. All such appointees tendered their resignation when a new administration came into office. Nobody had to be fired.

The Special Counsel may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. is unconstitutional. Why? Because every person in the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the president.

When congress put limits on when the Special Counsel could be fired, they overstepped their authority as granted by The People through Our Constitution.

Simple.

Challenges

Dellinger was fired. He was fired because the president did not trust him. Or because the gentleman wore bow ties instead of real ties. It doesn’t matter. He serves at the pleasure of The President.

When he was fired, he ran to the courts and asked the court to unfire him.

The court granted an “Administrative Stay”, stopping the firing. Now administrative stay is in quotes in all the paperwork by the state (good guys) filed and here because it is a made up term.

Courts can grant injunctions, temporary or otherwise. Superior courts can issue stays against inferior courts. Courts can issue administrative stays against themselves or inferior courts.

The common example is when an inferior court grants an injunction or final judgment, and they know the decision will be appealed. Rather than give the parties whiplash, they put an administrative stay on their order go give the parties time to appeal.

If the superior court does not issue a stay, then the administrative stay expires and the order or judgment goes into effect.

In this case, the plaintiff (bad guy) claims that he was fired in violation of 5 U.S.C. §1211(b). The Administrative Procedures Act.

He was. The state (good guys) did not offer any reason when the fired about Dellinger about “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” Thus, they did not meet the requirements of the APA regarding Dellinger.

I do not believe that the state attempted to justify the firing under the APA. Instead, the state made a Constitutional Challenge.

Otherwise known as a Civil Rights case.

This triggers a bunch of legal stuff I am not confident in my knowledge about. I.e. I don’t know what I don’t know.

I do know that the challenge should be addressed via the Winter factors.

The most important of which is the likelihood of success on the merits. Followed by irreparable harm, balance of equities, and public interest.

The Supreme Court has ruled that any denial of a Constitutionally protected right is irreparable harm. They have also stated that violation of a Constitutionally protected right balances to the person harmed. And that the public has no interest in enforcing an unconstitutional law.

In other words, if the challenger is likely to win on the merits, they win on all four Winter factors.

The Order

(“ultra vires” means “beyond legal power or authority”)

This is the judge saying that the President broke the law when he fired Dellinger.

The judge reasoned:

My interpretation of the judge’s reason is: Since Congress created this position in the executive branch, they get to decide the limits on what the President can do regarding this position, regardless of what the Constitution says.

Conclusion

Social media is all a fuss about Trump losing. This isn’t over. This case took 3 weeks to go from filed to final judgment. It has already been appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court.

This is being done on an expedited basis. If the Circuit court does not issue a stay on this, the state (good guys) will appeal to the Supreme Court for a stay pending the appeal.

It is my belief that a stay will be granted by the D.C. Circuit court or by the Supreme Court. This will stop the delay tactics that the left loves to use. If they want this done, they will have to push to get it done as quickly as possible.

When I started writing, regularly, for Miguel, I took it upon myself to cover legal cases. Since that time, I’ve learned more than I really wanted to about our justice system.

As my mentor used to say, “The justice system is just a system.” As a systems’ person, that allowed me to look at cases through the lens of my experience analyzing large systems.

One of the first things I noticed was that most people reporting on cases didn’t provide enough information for us to look up what was actually written or said.

CourtListener.com has come to my rescue for most legal filings in the federal system. If you know the court and the docket number you can find that case on CourtListener.

Once you have the docket located, you can start reading the filings. These are stored as PDFs. Most of my PDF tools allow me to copy and paste directly from the PDF.

What isn’t available on CourtListener is Supreme Court dockets. I’ve talked to Mike and others, the issue seems to be something about scrapping the Supreme Court website as well as other stuff. I’m not sure exactly what.

I want to be able to keep up on all the current cases in the Supreme Court, what their status currently is, what has been filed. They entirety of the case. I’m not concerned about most of the cases, but often it is easier to get all than a selected portion.

To this end, I have code that uses patterns to pull cases from the Supreme Court docket without have a listing of cases.

This tool will have search capabilities and other tools shortly, for now, it works well enough.

I am using the PySide6, which is a python implementation of the Qt framework. For the most part, I’m happy with this framework. There are parts I don’t like, which I work around.

My most recent success was figuring out how to allow me to click on hyperlinks in text to bring up my PDF viewer. This was not as simple as I wanted it to be, but it is working.

The other night, I wanted to write about a current case. I had the case docket in my tool. I pulled up the docket, clicked on the link, and John Roberts’ order popped up in my viewer, exactly as it should.

I started writing. Went to pull the quote and nothing.

Copy and paste does not seem to be functional in my tool.

Which takes me to the rant, which @#$)*&@$) coordinate system should I be using to get the right text!

Qt is built around widgets. Every widget has its coordinate system. In addition, there is the global coordinate system.

Each widget also has a paintEvent() which is when it paints itself.

To start the process, I capture mousePress, mouseMove, and mouseRelease events. While the mouse button is down, I draw a rectangle from the place clicked to the current location of the mouse.

I attempt to draw the rectangle and nothing shows up on the screen.

Through debugging code, I finally figured out that I am not updating the right widget.

The QPdfView widget properly renders the PDF document in a scrollable window. I have made a subclass of QPdfView so I am catching all paint events. But even though I’m telling the system that I have to redraw (update) my widget, there are no paint events being sent to my widget.

Turns out that my widget only cares about update signals that require the framing content be redrawn. I.e. if the scroll bar changes, then I get a paint event. Once I figured this out, I was able to tell the viewport that it should update and things started working.

So now I can draw a frame on the screen. But what I want is to get the text from within that frame.

I asked the QPdfDocument for a new selection from point_start to point_end. It tells me nothing is selected.

Where do I currently sit? I have my frame in my PDFViewer coordinate system. I have the PDF document in a different coordinate system. The PDF coordinate system is modified by the scroll bars or viewport. The scroll bars and scroll area modify the actual coordinate system of the viewport contents.

Somehow, I need to figure out which of these coordinate systems is the right coordinate system to use to get the text highlighted by my mouse.

I’m tired of this fight.

Actual filing in the case: