The House and Senate are both back in session this week. The House is moving to fast-track the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill the Administration is already touting as a win. The President had indicated earlier that he would sign the legislation, should it make its way to his desk. However, he recently posted on Truth Social that he will not sign the housing bill until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act (requiring proof of citizenship to vote), which he called “a national emergency.”
Senator Rick Scott, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, invited the President to attend the committee’s weekly lunch yesterday. The discussion centered around the Iran war, a possible third reconciliation bill, and passage of the SAVE America Act, among other pending legislative items.
Last week, while the House was in recess, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the defendant in a long-awaited, but strange, Second Amendment case, United States v. Hemani, brought to the court under the Biden Administration’s DOJ.
The question presented to the court was whether 18 USC 922(g)(3), the federal law that prohibits the possession of firearms by a person who “is an unlawful user of, or addicted to, any controlled substance,” violates the Second Amendment.
The case centers around an unsympathetic character, Ali Danial Hemani. In 2022, the FBI raided his home during an investigation into ties with terror organizations. At the time, Hemani admitted to frequently using marijuana. He also possessed a handgun. He was charged under 18 USC 922(g)(3). A conviction could have landed him in jail for 15 years and lifetime disarmament.
Pro-gun groups have been fighting this vague, ill-defined section of law for a long time, arguing that it provides the federal government with the power to strip whoever they deem as “dangerous” of their Second Amendment rights—whether it’s for consumption of controlled substances or some other reason.
In their Amicus Brief to the Supreme Court, Gun Owners of America wrote:
First, the Government builds its argument on the shakiest of historical foundations. It posits that legislatures may disarm categories of people deemed to be “dangerous.” Thus, because Congress made that assessment with respect to drug users, the Government claims Section 922(g)(3) passes muster…Second, the Government attempts to tie its disarmament theory to regulation of Founding-era “drunkards,” which took the form of vagrancy, civil commitment, and surety laws. But the first two out of three categories of laws were not even “firearm regulations” or “gun laws”…Fourth, the Government cannot continue its pattern of handpicking unsympathetic criminal defendants to justify its preferred gun control. The Framers understood that “[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The Government’s use of problematic defendants to broadly undermine the rights of tens of millions of Americans defies the plan of the Framers.
The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action wrote in its analysis of the case, “Hemani strongly reinforced the Court’s determination that categorical prohibitions on Second Amendment conduct must target legitimate risks to public safety and must have a strong grounding in the historical record. Prohibitions that sweep too broadly or are too far afield of founding era antecedents are now highly suspect and particularly vulnerable to similar ‘as-applied’ challenges.”
The court, in its opinion, held that merely consuming controlled substances doesn’t make you dangerous and therefore raises the bar for preventing individuals from being stripped of their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
The court decided the ban on possessing a gun while using marijuana was unconstitutional. In his concurrence, Justice Alito stated that “marijuana use today is like alcohol use at the time of the founding. It is widespread and increasingly considered socially acceptable in many quarters. And from a practical standpoint law enforcement widely tolerates the use of marijuana.”
ICYMI…