Explainer

In part 1, I showed how the 2011 congressional districts for Maryland were designed to stop Republicans from winning elections. The 2025 congressional districts look better, but I don’t know.

Watch this video to learn how it is nearly impossible for a human to evaluate if a districting is good or bad or how badly biased it might be.

In addition, you have to define what it means to be “biased.” Does it mean that if your general election shows an R 30%, a D 60%, and Other of 10% that you should have a 30/60/10 distribution of representatives?

What happens when you have a large city that is nearly 100% Democrat while the rest of the state is nearly 100% Republican? Does that one city get more representation because of its larger population?

These are all policy decisions. And I’m not in a position to say what the correct answer should be:

First, a huge shoutout to CourtListener.com. These guys are doing an impressive job of exposing the inner workings of the legal system.

They haven’t hit the state-level courts yet, but at the federal level, they really can’t be beat.

They are a part of the Free Law Project. FLP has managed to get contracts and access to many court filings. They have created software to scrub court filings and collect them in one place. They have created a good search engine that just works.

Recently they announced a new feature: voice-to-text transcription of circuit court oral arguments.

In general, it is much faster for me to read a transcript than to listen to it. Plus, knowing who is speaking makes a difference in understanding what is happening.

With this new feature, I expect to be paying more attention to oral arguments at the appellate level.

I am biased towards them; I contributed a small bit of coding a while ago. They have just gotten better since I found them.

Supreme Court Terms

The Supreme Court term runs from July 1st to July 1st. The old term ends on June 30th, and the new term starts on July 1st with the court starting business in October.

In practical terms, this means that the case numbers change on July 1st. We are now seeing cases with a “25-” prefix, indicating the case was filed in the 2025 term. We won’t see anything really happen until October.

During a term, motions are filed on the docket and the emergency docket. These motions request certain actions of the court. The one we are most familiar with is a motion for a writ of certiorari.

Normally these are filed on the main docket. If a stay or injunction is requested, that will normally be done through the emergency docket.

Occasionally a motion for a stay or injunction will turn into a motion for a writ of certiorari.

Over the course of the term, the Court will hear oral arguments on 60 to 70 cases. These cases encompass all areas of law. Constitutional issues, business law, property law, criminal law, and all the other areas that I don’t know anything about.

The case that overturned Chevron was an administrative case. It just happened to be incredibly important to dismantling the administrative state.

Because of the breadth of types of cases, SCOTUS does not like to take on repetitive cases nor too many cases in the same area. They would rather pick one to three cases that address issues significant to the Nation.

We can expect two or three Second Amendment cases to be heard in a term. The cases chosen will address large issues that advance jurisprudence in Second Amendment law.

Will there be an assault weapons ban case? At this point, I believe the court has indicated that it will not. The refusal to grant cert to Snope (Bianchi) is a strong indicator.

Snope has been an ongoing case since 2017. It was one of the cases looking for cert before cert was granted in Bruen.

The case was brought in the Fourth Circuit to get a favorable ruling to reverse Kolbe v. Hogan.

Bianchi made it to the Supreme Court. Was granted cert after Bruen. The opinion of the Fourth Circuit Court was vacated. The case was remanded to the Fourth Circuit for a “do-over” in light of Bruen.

Two years later, the en banc Fourth Circuit decided they had gotten it right the first time around.

A motion for cert was made to the Supreme Court. That motion was denied.

Why Didn’t The Supreme Court Take These Second Amendment Cases?

Because they are a do-over.

Bruen was a licensing case. The question asked was does the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms extend outside the home? The resounding answer was “YES!” The right to keep and bear arms does exist outside the home. All states are now must-issue states.

The rest of the opinion is dicta. In that dicta, the Court explained how to evaluate Second Amendment challenges. They stated that when there is a constitutional challenge, the first step is to determine if the plain text is implicated. If the plain text is implicated, then it becomes the government’s burden to prove a history and tradition of that type of regulation.

Note, this is for all constitutional challenges. This is the basis of originalism in jurisprudence.

Because the question asked had to do with the right to keep and bear arms outside the home, it was not a repeat of Heller. The Heller methodology was and always has been: is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated? If yes, then the burden shifts to the government to prove a historical tradition of matching firearms regulations.

Bruen did not change that in the least. It affirmed the Heller methodology.

Heller‘s dicta talks about how to find matching historical firearm regulations. It also discusses every word of the operative clause of the Second Amendment and why the operative clause is controlling and not “well regulated militia.”

In their research into the historical laws of this Nation, the Supreme Court could not find any regulations banning firearms that were in common use. Because there are no matching regulations, there is no history nor tradition of banning firearms in common use, such as the pistols at issue in Heller.

The opinion held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. The specific question allowed the gun-grabbers to limit that to “in the home”.

The gun haters then created a two-step shuffle where they would first decide on the level of scrutiny required to balance away any practical Second Amendment-protected rights in the anti-gun states.

Bruen extend those protections outside the home and explained that the two-step shuffle was not allowed.

So what is Snope? The question asked in Snope is can the state ban a firearm in common use?

This is the same as Heller. The observed fact that the lower courts are not applying Heller correctly does not make the case significant to The Court.

Misbehaving inferior courts can be slapped down via other means.

Types of Second Amendment Cases

I believe there are a few types of cases that are making their way up the court system that will interest The Court.

The first is “sensitive places.” While SCOTUS gave examples of “sensitive places” and examples of what were not “sensitive places”, the states have decided on their definition.

The state’s definition of sensitive place is any place they don’t want armed people.

The second type of case is a definition of “The People.” There have been several cases where 18-20 year-olds have challenged laws restricting their right to keep and bear arms. There is a clear circuit split.

This case would allow The Court to clarify that “The People” means all the people. They might choose to extend that definition to people under the age of 18 as well as legal residents of the United States.

The more important part of that decision will be the dicta. That is where The Court will, again, tell the inferior courts how to do it right.

Finally, I believe we are going to see a case on the NFA. It won’t address machine guns; it will address infringements when there is no justification.

Remember, the reason that you can’t buy a short-barreled rifle with a 4473 is because the federal government has to collect a tax on the transfer of that firearm.

All the requirements, extra background checks, fingerprinting, and chief law enforcement officer approval exist to make sure that you pay your transfer fee and that you can prove that you have paid, on demand.

And nobody is stopping you from buying a machine gun if you are willing to meet the requirements and pay your $200 tax. The closing of the NFA to new machine guns isn’t stopping you from buying existing (pre-1986) machine guns.

In a few years, we might see something challenging the right to acquire machine guns. Acquiring would include making them.

If it ever becomes possible to add new machine guns to the NFA, I can see a booming business for drill guide jigs.

Conclusion

There are big things coming from the Supreme Court in the Second Amendment area. I’m sure it will be good.

The Trump Administration has announced numbers for tariffs collected. The number is huge, something like $77 billion. Of course the panic vendors are now screaming that this means that Americans paid $77 billion in taxes. They also claim that the tariffs are causing the price of everything to skyrocket.

Let’s take the case of a lowly woodworker making a stool. The stool is made from two pieces of 2×4 by 8 ft.

Because the woodworker wants to up his game, he decides to use a different wood; he chooses Canadian maple.

A quick check on wood prices shows that hard maple is running $6 per board foot. The amount of lumber needed is 2*4*8/12 = 5.33 bf.

Or, 2*4*96 / 144 = 5.33 bf

At a cost of $6 per board foot, this means the cost of the lumber will be $32.

The woodworker uses a $25/hour labor rate. It will take him 3 hours to build the stool using hand tools and rough-cut lumber. That is $75 in labor.

There is another cost for the finish and time for finishing. We are ignoring that part of the equation. He also adds a 20% profit for the business.

Putting it all together, we get $32 for the wood, $75 for the labor, and $21.40 for profit, for a total sale price of $128.40.

Now say that there is a 25% tariff put on importing that wood from Canada. This would be $8 that needs to be paid to the US government.

From a bit of insider knowledge, I know that the $8 can be paid by the company shipping the wood, making the 25% come out of their profit. They might split the cost 50/50, or they can pass the entire cost on to the buyer, our woodworker.

Assuming our woodworker gets the entire $8 passed on to them, let’s see what that does to the cost of our stool.

$40 for the wood, $75 for labor, and $23 for profit, giving a total price for the stool of $138. With a 25% tariff on the cost of the materials, we see a $9.60 increase in the price. That is a 7.5% increase in the price of the stool.

The truth of the matter is that many products only use pennies of tariffed materials in their goods. Hershey increased the price of their chocolate recently. While the left is screaming “Tariffs!” the fact is that cocoa costs went up. The tariffs are a small part of the increase in costs.

The more value added in the US, the more the profit margin is the less impact tariffs have on your costs.

I do know people who are having a difficult time because of the tariffs. Their product uses a gizmo they import from China. That gizmo is not made in the US because there was no profit in making that gizmo here.

Until there is a US competitor for those gizmos, she is going to have to pay the tariffs on those gizmos. She has announced a very modest increase in the price of her goods to cover her increased costs. She feels miserable for doing so.

Regardless, our economy seems to be doing much better in 2025 than it was in 2024.

It doesn’t matter if you are provided a path to what you want if you can never reach that path.

We talk about 18 U.S.C. §922(g) often. This is the prohibited person section of the US Code. It is what is used to justify form 4473.

The government is allowed to create regulations that are necessary to perform the task they are required to do by law. This is how come the NFA has a registration and background check plus all the rest of the BS that goes with purchasing an NFA item.

All of those regulations are in place to make sure that you have paid your taxes. The entire NFA is based on collecting taxes. The registration is just a byproduct of collecting taxes. The background check is just a byproduct of collecting taxes.

§922(g) states who is prohibited from possessing a firearm. This is a horrible mutation from the original version of §922(g). The original version was a restriction on FFLs from selling to a prohibited person.

A prohibited person could buy a gun from somebody else or acquire it by gift. They could still lawfully posses it.

In addition, they could manufacture a firearm and possess that. §922(g) was only a restriction on the sale of interstate commerce in firearms.

When Congress passed the original §922(g) in 1968, they also included a method to get your Second Amendment protected rights back. Under 18 U.S.C. §925(c).

This means there is a procedure to get your rights back by asking Mommy Dearest for permission.

In 1992, Congress added a rider to the appropriations bill.

This has been going on for the last 33 years!

What this means is that you can apply for your rights back, but there is no money for the ATF to process those requests. So you have no mouth.

The most recent version of the rider is:

The Department of Justice just announced that they are opening a web portal for people to apply to regain their Second Amendment protected rights. Since “main justice” is doing this, it comes under their budget and not the salaries of ATF personnel.

This is another major Trump Administration end run around a violation of our rights.

In —Trump, President of The United States, et all., v. CASA, Inc., et al., 2025 606 U.S., the Supreme Court found, in a 6-3 decision, that universal injunctions are not constitutional. This is great news. It puts a stop to most of the lawfare going on against the Trump Administration.

Unfortunately, it leaves open another method of getting the equivalent, class action suits.

To have a class action suit, the class must first be certified. This is done via Rule 23 —Rules For Appellate Procedure (U.S.) (I’m hoping that is the correct citation). It is such a complex procedure that there are lawyers (and law offices) that do nothing but class action certification attempts.

For the Trump Administration, this complexity is a good thing. It means that it is more difficult to get these universal injunctions.

In reality, we are going to see suits filed as class actions. The anti-American groups will still go judge/court shopping, in an attempt to get a judge, favorable to their cause.

—J.G.G. v. TRUMP, No. 1:25-cv-00766 (D.D.C.) is such an example. They are attempting to get a class certified. They didn’t push hard because the rogue inferior court judge granted them a universal injunction. I suspect they will now go back to the well with a demand for a class certification.

This will not stop rogue judges in inferior courts doing bad things, it will make it more costly at the first step, to the plaintiffs (bad guys)

But what happens when a Democrat issues an EO banning guns?

It doesn’t really change anything. There are people claiming it will, but that is not really the case.

In the past 5 decades, have you read of a single universal injunction granted to The People in a Second Amendment case? Yeah, that is correct. There is none.

The closest we’ve gotten is courts issuing injunctive relief to all members of a group, such as GOA or FPC.

Since we aren’t getting nor will we get universal injunctions, there is no need to be concerned that others won’t be able to get universal injunctions.

If that scary EO comes down in the future, FPC and GOA and the NRA and … will show up in Texas and file suit on behalf of a few individuals. Those individuals will be members of those groups. The groups will then become a party to the suit.

This means that when a Texas district judge issues an injunction, TRO or preliminary, it will protect a large section of the firearm community.

The state will appeal for a stay, pending appeal. The fifth will deny that stay. The case will continue through the merits panel. The state will lose. The state will request an en banc panel. They will lose or their motion for an en banc hearing will be denied.

The state will then either appeal to the Supreme Court, where cert is likely to be granted, remember, this is the scary EO that bans everything. The Supreme Court gets to issue another great opinion on the Second Amendment.

The state could choose to take the L in Texas. Which isn’t a big deal because the plaintiffs will have also filed suit in California, Maryland, Florida, and Illinois.

Florida will go the same way as Texas.

The standard rogue, inferior courts will find for the state and against The People.

This will create a circuit split, which pushes the Supreme Court to take the case.

This sort of thing is at least 8 years in the future.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court seems to be actively looking for the “right” Second Amendment case to take next.

Oh, take a look at Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic where The Court wrote:

The short of that is that the Supreme Court is getting tired of rogue inferior court judges playing dump when it advances their agenda.

This bit of text is quoted in almost every case where the state is defending their blatant infringements.

They still use this citation, even post Bruen. After Bruen, they added a ⁣more nuanced approach.

What these two quotes have in common is that they are “dicta”.

Dicta is short for obiter dictum. It refers to statements made by a judge in a legal opinion which are not essential to the decision of the case.

What is essential is the holding.

Part of the problem is that the superior courts would rather not resolve the same issues over and over again. They want a one and done case.

The core holding in Heller was that the Second Amendment was an individual right. As such, any ban of a class of firearm, defacto or not, was unconstitutional.

That’s it. The entire discussion on dangerous and unusual, in common use for lawful purposes, and “this is how you perform Second Amendment jurisprudence” is dicta.

Because it is “just” dicta, the inferior courts can choose to ignore it. Or pick and choose which parts of dicta they wish to use.

The rogue inferior courts will use the “not unlimited” to search for the boundaries. Then they will find that the particular law is outside the boundaries of the Second Amendment.

The Bruen opinion introduced more dicta. These dicta were directed orders to the inferior courts. No more two-step shuffle. No more means balancing.

The inferior courts were told, clearly, that the process of picking a level of scrutiny, and then applying a balancing procedure was unacceptable.

They were told to first look at the plain text of the Constitution. The very same language the Court has been using for decades, if not centuries. These inferior courts have shown that they are perfectly capable of reading the plain text of every part of the Constitution, except the Second Amendment.

Once the conduct “touches fingers” with the Second Amendment, the burden shifts to the state to show that their regulation is a match for this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

In Rahimi, they said that a person can only be temporarily denied their Second Amendment protected rights. The inferior courts then proceeded to decide that a permanent loss of Second Amendment protected rights was Constitutional, when applied to anybody who could have been sentenced to more than a year in jail/prison.

This is also dicta. This paragraph was written by Justice Kagan. Justice Sotomayor wrote something similar in Rahimi, I believe. Where she also admitted that the AR-15 was in common use for legal purposes.

After S&W v. Mexico was decided, many of the plaintiffs (good guys) filed notices with their respective courts, pointing them to the opinion. The gist of many of these notifications were, “The plain text is implicated. The burden shifts to the government to prove their ban is justified by this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Supreme Court stated that a firearm or class of firearms can only be banned if it is both dangerous and unusual. If a firearm or class of firearm is in common use, it is not unusual and cannot be banned. Justice Kagan said AR-15s are in common use.”

Well, the replies to those filings have started to come in. In a shocking turn of events, the infringers are now arguing that the Justice Kagan quote is “just dicta” and should be discarded. That it is just meaningless noise.

(But please remember that my dicta, “not unlimited”, cannot be discarded. It was put into a Supreme Court opinion.)

There are five listed exceptions.

1. The transferor was convicted under section 925(h) of U.S.C. 18. This is part of the gun control action of 1968, as amended.
2. The seller is guilty of negligence or negligent entrustment.
3. The manufacturer or seller knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, AND the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.
4. for breach of contract or warranty.
5. Death, injury, or property damage resulting from a defect in design or manufacturer of the product, when used as intended.

Only section iii has any wiggle room. The question then becomes one of “proximate cause”.

For example, in the original Lilo and Stitch, there is a scene where the child crawls into a washing machine or a dryer. If your child were to watch the movie and then replicate crawling into the dryer or washing machine, and then they were injured or killed, you might be able to sue Disney for that scene because it was the “proximate cause” of the injury.

Claiming that an advertisement, in a firearms’ magazine, stating “Consider your man card reissued”, is the proximate cause of an asshole killing children and adults in a school shooting is a serious stretch.

This is precisely what the blood vultures did after Sandy Hook. They had the parents file a lawsuit against Bushmaster, with the novel legal argument that since Connecticut has laws about certain types of advertisements, and because the PLCAA had an exception for sale or marketing, that the suit would evade PLCAA protections.

This should have required the plaintiffs (bad guys) to prove that not only did Bushmaster produce advertisements that were in violation of CT law, but also that the asshole actually saw the advertisements and that those advertisements somehow incited the asshole to go murder children.

This should have been thrown out in the lowest court, where the case was filed. Instead, the case made it to the CT supreme court where they said, “This advertising claim might actually pierce the PLCAA protections. Please continue the case to establish a fact pattern.”

The Supreme Court did not stop this travesty. Remington went under, this lawsuit was part of the reason.

Since the insurance companies, which owned the Remington Name, settled for a considerable amount, more lawsuits attacking manufactures have been filed. One bad decision leads to more bad decisions.

Kagan gets it right, Mexico is alleging that S&W et al. were doing something illegal. For that to be true, there would have to be convictions for those illegal acts.

In the very next paragraph, she slaps down all those that say that the firearms industry is the only industry that can’t be sued. 15 U.S.C. §§7901–7903, bars certain lawsuits against manufacturers and sellers of firearms. — id.

Kagan skillfully avoids the advertising part of the law, here. Instead, she gives a concrete example of how the law was intended to be used. If the seller or manufacturer breaks the law by the transfer of the firearm, they can be held responsible for later harms caused by a third party.

Yep, the PLCAA is implicated here, and should protect the defendants (good guys). Mexico is attempting to pierce the PLCAA’s protections by claiming the manufacturers were knowingly violating gun laws.

Wow, this is a big one. To pierce the PLCAA protections, the plaintiffs must prove that the manufacturer’s actions were the proximate cause of the injury. Before that can be done, they must first plausibly prove that the manufacturers added and abetted the illegal act which led to the injury. Mexico has not met the minimum requirements for plausible, much less probably.

To translate into language even a leftist can understand, “AR-15s are in common use”

Justice Jackson wrote a concurrence. Her concurrence is designed to limit the extent of the actual opinion.

In her flawed opinion, the only reason Mexico did not prevail is that they didn’t point to a specific violation of state or federal laws. If only they had done that, the court would have allowed them to put it to those evil gun manufacturers.

She also, intentionally, misstates the reasons for PLCAA. We have observed that lawfare is intended to destroy the defendants. The flood of civil lawsuits was designed to destroy the firearms industry. Even the military said as much.

According to Justice Jackson, Activists had deployed litigation in an effort to compel firearms manufacturers and associated entities to adopt safety measures and practices that exceeded what state or federal statutes required.Missing citations for GW4C5JVQ.

She has such a strong opinion of the good will and selfless motives of those filing lawsuits.

Trump v. Wilcox on application for stay was granted. It was a 6-3 opinion. The usual suspects were on the wrong side of history, again.

Justice Kagan wrote the dissent.

Miggy made the mistake of letting me write for him. Then I begged him to let me write when he wanted to close GFZ. When I started, I knew I had things to say about some cases happening. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I started reading and listening. The more I learned, the more I knew I needed to learn.

I have gotten to the point where I read at least part of every opinion the Supreme Court writes. Certain things keep showing up.

It is obvious to any honest person that the Second Amendment means that all gun-control is unconstitutional. The closest we have gotten to anything that is even remotely close to being allowed is that a violent person can be temporarily disarmed.

The Justices that believe in the Constitution express it as “The plain text and this Nation’s historical tradition of …”. This means that if the plain text of the Constitution is implicated, the burden shifts to the government to prove that there were similar regulations at the time the constitution was adopted and when the particular amendment was ratified.

The 14th Amendment must be interpreted as it was understood at the time it was ratified, in the late 1800s, not 1791. The Second Amendment must be interpreted as it was understood at the time it was ratified, in 1791.

The authority of the Executive branch was established on June 22, 1788.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States was issued in 1935. It cannot be used to establish the meaning of Article II. It is NOT part of this Nation’s historical tradition of regulations regarding the President’s authority.

Since Roe v Wade, every Supreme Court nomination has been asked, “will you mess with Roe v. Wade?”. If the answer is “yes”, the Democrats would fight tooth and nail to keep that person off the Court.

This is always the way of the left. We see it in the court battles against the Trump administration. They will fight a battle, lose, claim victory, then fight the same battle again.

They repeat this until they win. After they win, they claim that this is the standard and cannot be chanted. To attempt to change it is evil, against the will of The Person, and wrong. This is what is happening with the court shopping they are doing. They don’t have to win every case against Trump, just one.

If they lose, they will attempt the same case in a different jurisdiction, until they get a win.

Roe v. Wade was a shit decision. The Dred Scott opinion was even worse. But according to the left, these cases should never have been challenged, much less overturned.

FDR decided that Government was the answer. Regardless of the question, the answer, according to him, was the government.

You don’t have a job? The government will create work, then hire you to do that work. People aren’t preparing for their retirement, the government will do that for you.

The problem he was facing was that much of what he wanted to do wasn’t really constitutional.

In addition, the next president could just undo the shitty things he had done. He needed a way to protect his policies.

The answer was the creation of Government Entities that were performing Article II duties, but which had limited presidential oversight.

Before FDR’s power grab, the president could fire anybody in the executive branch. He was that powerful. He got Congress to pass bills creating entities who’s governing body or head could only be fired for cause.

Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson all believe that an opinion from 90 years ago says more about this Nation’s historical tradition of regulations than does Article II, adopted in 1788.

The People chose to put the authority into one person, the President, who they could change, every four years. The government is beholden to the People. The government doesn’t get to say that “a group of knowledgeable people” should be exempt.

Power corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We have heard, over and over again, how some scum was released back into society to do more evil.

In my opinion, the worst of these is when a criminal alien is released into society when the authorities know he has a detainer. Why would anybody allow someone who was picked up for a crime to be released to commit more crimes when they can have them removed from the country?

The answer is partially word games and partially legal games.

A detainer is a warrant, of sorts. It is a warrant issued by an administrative judge, not a part of the judiciary.

We have been taught that the police are not allowed to enter your home without a warrant. In some cases, they can’t enter your house, even if they have a warrant.

Sanctuary cities and states have been using this to allow criminals to roam our streets freely.

If the locals are doing their jobs correctly, they should do a search for warrants on anybody they arrest. This will pick up both judicial and administrative warrants. If warrants exist, that person should not be released until those warrants are cleared.

In sanctuary locations, the locals have not been informing ICE when they have a criminal alien in custody.

This means that ICE needs to look through the records of everyone who is taken into custody, searching for people with warrants. If they find a person with an outstanding warrant, they must pick them up before they are released.

If there are only administrative warrants, ICE is restricted on what they can do.

They cannot enter non-public locations to detain a criminal alien.

They can arrest the criminal alien if they are in a public location. Thus, they could pick them up while they are shopping or driving around. They can detain them at work, if they have permission of the owner to enter the non-public locations, or if the criminal alien encounters them in a public location.

In other words, a criminal alien can hide at work or home. If they leave the protection of those non-public locations, they can be detained.

On the other hand, if they have a judicial arrest warrant, they can go into non-public locations to affect the arrest.

That warrant allows them to enter the home or apartment of the criminal alien, if that alien is legally the homeowner or lessee. They cannot enter a third party’s dwelling with an arrest warrant.

A judicial arrest warrant allows them the legal authority to enter some non-public areas, such as jails, prisons, and courtrooms.

In addition, if they can get a search warrant for the criminal alien, that warrant will name the location where they can enter without permission to search for the criminal alien. If they find them, they can then arrest them with an arrest warrant.

ICE and the rest of the feds are now getting judicial warrants as well as the administrative warrants. This allows them to arrest criminal aliens, regardless of the “sanctuary” status.

More progress.

Justice Sotomayor used to be the least talented Justice on the Supreme Court. Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Hold my beer!” and took that title.

During the oral arguments, Sotomayor asked:

When a case is opened, the plaintiffs can make a motion for a temporary restraining order. This is another name for an injunction. A TRO should last no more than a couple of weeks, should maintain the status quo and should not grant final outcomes. Sorry for the poor English.

Thus, a TRO might stay an execution. This is the current status, so no change, maintaining the status quo. This is within the normal understanding of a TRO.

The TRO should not release the prisoner. That is a final outcome. That might be what the plaintiff is requesting, to be set free. That is what the final judgment would or would not grant.

In some cases, the plaintiff can be ordered to provide a bond before the TRO is issued. For example, the plaintiffs want the state to payout $2 billion as part of the TRO. They can be ordered to post a $2 billion bond before the defendants are required to pay out the $2 billion.

By the end of the TRO, the arguments for and against a preliminary injunction should be fully briefed. If there are any oral arguments to be made, those will have also been made.

The judge will then issue a preliminary injunction/stay as the TRO lapses, or will not issue the preliminary injunction/stay, which means the TRO lapses and nothing takes it place.

In general, TROs and Preliminary Injunctions are only granted to the parties of the case. The judge can issue a TRO blocking the execution of prisoner A, but unless prisoner B is also a party to the suit, the TRO does not apply to them.

If the case is a class action suit, once the class is granted, then orders of the court apply to the entire class. If the parties are an organization, the injunctions might apply to all members of the organization.

So what happens in Sotomayor’s hypothetical if there are no universal injunctions?

First, I don’t believe that we are going to have a situation where there are no universal injunctions. I believe that Sotomayor is correct, we need to preserve that capability for the judiciary.

What I believe would actually happen is that a true universal TRO would be issued. This would have a limited lift time.

Blocking the deportation of TdA for two weeks is a pain, but not unbearable. Blocking the deportation of TdA for the duration of a drawn out court case is unacceptable.

Blocking the confiscation of guns for two weeks for everybody is just as bearable.

This would give the inferior court time to certify the class, if such was needed, and to do a proper evaluation of the request for a preliminary injunction.

As the Supreme Court said in A.A.R.P v. Trump, the inferior courts MUST answer the merits question of the Winter factors. They cannot side step this.

In the case of TdA, the government will win on the merits. They have been granted the authority to remove criminal aliens from the United States by the Constitution and Congress. The most that might be justified is the process might require enough time for an attorney to become involved.

In the case of a gun confiscation, the plain text of the Second Amendment would be implicated. There is no way around that. There is no regulation in this Nation’s history of arms regulation that is analogous to an outright gun confiscation. The People are likely to win on the merits. Having a Constitutionally Protected right violated is unrepairable harm. The balance of equities lies with The People who have been harmed. Being denied your rights outweighs any state harm. The public has no interest in upholding an Unconstitutional Law or Regulation.

For the Circuit courts that would suddenly find that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms only applies to Nerf guns would cause a nearly instant circuit split, which would get appealed to the Supreme Court.

In addition, it would be physically difficult to confiscate all guns.