Left Assails SCOTUS for Blocking Trump's Rewrite of Federal Law
In Garland v. Cargill, the justices broke on ideological lines over whether the ATF can redefine the meaning of "machinegun."
Federal law restricts the possession of “machineguns,” which are defined by their ability to “shoot, automatically more than one shot . . . by a single function of the trigger.” 26 USC § 5845(b). On the other hand, semiautomatic firearms (like AR-15s), which require shooters to re-engage the trigger for every shot, aren’t machineguns and civilian possession isn’t so restricted.
For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) consistently held that rifles equipped with bump stocks don’t constitute machineguns. (Bump stocks are accessories that use the recoil of a semiautomatic firearm to fire bullets more rapidly than one can otherwise pull the trigger in rapid succession.)
In 2017, after the mass shooting at a country-music festival in Las Vegas, the ATF reversed its position, reclassified bump stocks as machineguns, and ordered owners to destroy or surrender the devices within 90 days or face prosecution. Michael Cargill lawfully purchased two bump stocks before ATF’s 2018 adoption of its expanded definition. He surrendered them to comply with the ATF rule, then filed a lawsuit arguing that the ATF went beyond its statutory authority.
The federal district court and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with the ATF. The en banc (all judges) Fifth Circuit reversed 13-3. Eight judges agreed with Cargill that bump stocks didn’t fall under the definition of “machinegun” and that the ATF can’t arbitrarily change the law; five others found that the statute was ambiguous, but that they must rule for Cargill under the rule of lenity (the idea that, when a statute is ambiguous, courts must find for a criminal defendant).
The Manhattan Institute worked with lawyers from the Boyden Gray firm to build on my past related work and file an amicus brief arguing that Chevron (judicial deference to an agency’s statutory interpretation) doesn’t apply given (1) the political impetus for ATF’s new rule, (2) the unknowable bounds of such expansive deference, and (3) the general, non-expert nature of the government’s brief. MI’s involvement affirms our long and nonpartisan record of challenging unconstitutional government overreach.
On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on “ideological” lines (a rare occurrence so far this term) that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machinegun because it can’t fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger,” even if the device reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate “functions” of the trigger. Further, the Court held, the ATF’s position is logically inconsistent, as it would mean that a rifle without a bump stock can fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, despite ATF’s agreement that it can’t. Moreover, even if a bump stock did result in multiple shots being fired, it wouldn’t do so “automatically,” as the shooter must maintain forward pressure on the front grip in addition to engaging the trigger. Finally, the majority disagreed with the dissent’s assertion that interpreting the law to exclude rifles with bump stocks would make the statute useless or enable people to evade restrictions on machineguns.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, did indeed make that assertion in dissent. She argued that semi-automatics with bump stocks are machineguns because they fire continuously for as long as the shooter maintains forward pressure while keeping his finger on the finger rest. The dissenters would have defined “single function of a trigger” by looking to the human act of the shooter’s initial pull of the trigger rather than to the internal mechanism that initiates fire. In that sense, a bump-stock-equipped AR-15 is no different from a machinegun. Interestingly, in making that analogy, Justice Sotomayor wrote that semiautomatic rifles are “commonly available”—which acknowledgment should make them harder to restrict given the strong Second Amendment given to firearms in common civilian use.
In any event, this was an easy case that stands for the basic proposition that an executive agency can’t rewrite the law to make it say what it wants to say. As Justice Alito wrote in concurrence, “there is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation.”
And that’s regardless of any partisan valence: Here, the Trump ATF expanded its own authority and the Biden ATF and Justice Department defended that executive lawmaking. And note that all Republican-appointed justices ruled against the Trump-era power grab while all Democratic-appointed justices ruled for it.
So any headlines you’ve seen, or exasperated statements by demagogic politicians, suggesting that the Supreme Court was “legislating from the bench” to strike down gun control—or to legalize machineguns—is just plain bonkers, as well as disingenuous. If the Trump administration hadn’t stepped in to short circuit the congressional push to restrict bump stocks in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, any resulting law would almost certainly have survived judicial scrutiny. (Indeed, if you search for “Second Amendment” in the Garland v. Cargill opinion, you’ll come up empty.) But here, true to form, the originalist/textualist justices recognized limits on executive power, while the progressive ones would’ve given free rein to the administrative state—even with Donald Trump at its head!
So that’s that. Happy Father’s Day, everyone!
"It's a strange and beautiful world." - Down by Law. Happy Father's day to you too.