The Supreme Court Doesn't Care If You Die
The conservative SCOTUS majority just made it much easier to kill people, again.
Reports of the devastation and violence of Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Rafah are harrowing. Please continue to call your Representative and Senators to let them know in no uncertain terms that the number one priority should be an immediate ceasefire and that we should not be sending any aid or weapons to Israel while their military commits these atrocities. You can find a guide to making these phone calls here. You can contact the White House to tell them the same here. And you can find verified GoFundMes to help Palestinians here.
June is a strange month. It’s finally starting to get warm in New York, sloughing off the last of the spring rain. School is out, pools are open, everything smells like sunscreen and blooming. And also every Thursday and often some Fridays, the Supreme Court emerges from their hallowed halls to ruin our lives.
On Friday of last week the Supreme Court released their decision in Garland v. Carville which disputed the legality of the Trump era ban on bump stocks issued by the ATF in 2018. Bump stocks, for those who don’t know, are accessories you can add to your firearms that harness the power of the gun’s recoil to make many, many more shots. In fact, it can essentially turn a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun, firing up to 800 rounds per minute. The Trump administration, in a rare display of humanity that they are now distancing themselves from, banned bump stocks by issuing a rule classifying them as machine guns, which are outlawed for civilian ownership, after the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017. The shooter in Las Vegas used a bump stock to kill 60 people and wound over 400 more.
The conservative majority of the Supreme Court (which includes Justices Thomas, Alito, and Roberts, as well as the three Justices appointed by Donald Trump, Coney Barret, Kavanagh, and Gorsuch) overturned this new rule, releasing bump stocks back into the firearm market. The majority had a lot to say in this case about the technicalities of how bump stocks work, about how you have to pull the trigger, about how the recoil works, about the particulars of the standing federal ban on machine guns, but none of that is why they ruled that bump stocks are legal.
They did that because they don’t care whether or not you die.
There is no point to a bump stock besides killing more people. There’s no version of hunting or self defense that requires firing up to 800 shots in a minute. There is no skill in bump stocks, no sport. The purpose of a bump stock is to cause destruction on a massive scale, and in a country plagued by mass shootings it is clear - people will die because of this. And lest you think this is just a side effect of a technical ruling about executive overreach, know that the Supreme Court decided in 2022 to establish a new test for evaluating the laws states pass around gun safety. That test said that courts should no longer use public interest and public safety to evaluate gun laws, but instead should establish whether or not gun safety legislation is consistent with the “historical tradition of firearm regulation” in this country.
What does that mean in a country still ruled by a constitution written over 200 years ago? What does it mean when white settlers, guns in hand, stole every inch of this land, when slave revolts were crushed and Jim Crow laws enforced and protests broken up by people with guns? When headline after headline after headline - domestic violence, mass shootings and police shootings and weapons of war and war itself and more, and more, and more guns.
In keeping with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court said we don’t care who this kills, we don’t care how many. To those of you who want to kill, here, have your 800 rounds. And to the rest of you, here, have your fear. Have your fear of the movies, the park, the music festival. Have your fear of the grocery store, school, your house of worship. Be afraid when you go to a sports game or a concert or a show. Be afraid when you gather, be afraid when you sing, be afraid when you run.
For those who seek power through violence, let’s make it easier. For those who seek safety and community, tough luck.
This is the same Supreme Court that has not yet released its decision whether or not presidents should be immune from prosecution for official conduct, which Trump claims covers his actions on January 6th. Because of the machinations of the justice system, the longer the Supreme Court delays, the less and less likely it is that we will have a verdict in the cases around Trump’s culpability in the January 6th riot before the election where we may very well elect him president - an exercise in political violence, an attempt to overthrow the government, to subvert the will of the voters, that involved zip-ties and smoke bombs and, yes, guns. With every day we don’t get a decision in Trump’s presidential immunity case, the Supreme Court empowers and invigorates the possibility of more of that same political violence.
More political violence is an inevitability with Trump - not just because Trump has promised no further regulation on guns while the Supreme Court has given every indication that it will keep overturning gun safety laws passed in the states. And not just because that violence was a prominent part of his first term. Trump, and his cronies in his administration and the media, encouraged violence at every turn. They reposted violent imagery on social media, they threatened the press, they dehumanized people and in this celebration of violence, and among constant mass shootings, a man also mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats. In addition to all that, however, more political violence in a second Trump term is inevitable because he says so. Trump has promised mass deportations, to pardon January 6th rioters, to use the US military to break up protests, to prosecute political opponents, and to purge anyone disloyal from the government
The Supreme Court doesn’t care about any of that. The Supreme Court does not care about the future of our democracy, and the Supreme Court does not care if you die.
We don’t just see this with guns. People who need abortions have already died because of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. And more will die if Republicans from Idaho triumph in their case in front of the Supreme Court regarding EMTALA. EMTALA is the law that requires hospitals to provide stabilizing care to preserve the life and health of anyone who shows up. Idaho contends that their abortion ban means that hospitals should not have to provide abortions to preserve the health of their patients, only their life. But not only do doctors not know when their patients are in enough danger to warrant an abortion, many of the arguments in the Supreme Court revolved around how much organ failure pregnant people were intended to endure until it could be reasonably supposed that their lives were in danger.
And this is the same Supreme Court that just last year gutted the EPA’s authority to use the Clean Power Act to fight climate change. As summer gets hotter, as winter gets colder, as storms get stronger and the ocean gets higher, god forbid we use the power of the federal government to protect our ability to live on this planet.
The Supreme Court, of course, has this much power in part because Congress is at best dysfunctional and at worst actively self-sabotaging. Without a Congress that is willing to pass laws through compromise or sheer overwhelming force, our only mechanism for solving problems is the relentless back and forth between the executive branch and the Supreme Court. It should not be lost that Congressional dysfunction is largely a product of the radical right holding their own party hostage to its most horrifying positions. And as long the propulsive force behind half our country’s politics is vacuous, attention grabbing violence - against queer people, against people of color, against cities, against books, against public health, against Democrats - we will be stuck here at the mercy of a vicious Congress and a Supreme Court that does not care if you die.
At the moment we have little recourse against the Supreme Court unless we remind people every day about the impact of their decisions, about the corruption of some of the Justices, about their lack of transparency and accountability. But we do have recourse to stop the bleeding. We can make sure Democrats win the White House and the Senate so that Republicans do not have the chance to appoint two 25 year old fascist law clerks to the bench if Thomas and Alito retire. We can elect more progressives to both houses of Congress, who will overturn the filibuster, pass an enforceable code of conduct and ethics reform for the Supreme Court, and who will fight for a world where we can all thrive. And we can push back against the culture of power and violence that defines right-wing politics, that is bolstered by money and empowered by guns.
This Supreme Court doesn’t care if you die. So we must. And we will.
A really grim piece, Sara, but completely necessary.
Honestly heartbreaking and infuriating on levels I never imagined were possible. We need to expand the court and hold it accountable. Just a fabulously well written piece.