It wasn’t all that long ago when the left went around trying to tear down any statue that had anything at all to do with slavery. While I’m not going to pretend slavery was remotely good for anyone besides, maybe, the people who owned them–and I’m not sold that it was good for them, either–I also don’t think that tearing down our history is a good idea. Especially when you start trying to tear down statues of our Founding Fathers who weren’t honored for their stances on owning other people.
Now, celebrating racism is not something I want a part of, but I don’t want to strip away history. Easy enough to understand, right?
What gets me, though, is how the people who wanted to tear down monuments and rename anything that was remotely connected to that dark time in America’s past are now very upset that the Supreme Court rejected racist laws.
For example, The New Republic is very bothered by this.
Perhaps the most controversial citation made by Hawaii was to an 1865 law in Louisiana that made it illegal to bear arms “on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.” Alito dismissed the statute because it was an isolated example and not “widespread, well-known, or widely accepted.”
The conservative justices have left open a debate over whether Reconstruction-era gun laws have any weight in the Bruen test. Under the court’s precedents, the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Therefore, the “original public meaning” that the court claims to seek might naturally take them to the 1860s when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and not just the 1790s when the Second Amendment was adopted or earlier.
But there’s a complicating factor here: Louisiana did not adopt the 1865 law in a vacuum. Instead, it enacted the restriction as part of what became known as the Black Codes—laws specifically designed to deprive formerly enslaved Black Americans of the fundamental rights that they would otherwise enjoy. In other cases, states have cited founding-era gun restrictions drafted to disarm Native Americans and enslaved people. To what extent does that reflect the “original public meaning” of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments?
In Alito’s eyes, such laws hold no weight. He concluded that the Radical Republicans who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment intended to protect Black civil rights, including an individual right to bear arms, and that this intent supersedes that of Southern state legislatures. “Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously,” he wrote.
While the author seems cool with shooting down racist laws, the issue in his mind is that the Court was supposedly inconsistent.
It is always a welcome sight to see the Supreme Court condemn the bigotry and discrimination of the past. The majority’s words would also carry slightly more weight, however, if they were more consistent about it in the present. Their condemnation, for example, would have more moral weight if she and her conservative colleagues had not gone out of their way to sanitize Trump’s racist bile towards Haitians as merely a strong, constitutionally permissible critique of immigration in Mullen v. Doe—a case decided on the same day as Wolford.
Except here, the law itself is what it is. While Trump may have said some things that a lot of people thought of as racist–the linked piece doesn’t seem to include them, interestingly–the temporary protected status of those Haitians was just that, temporary. I find it funny that the people who tripped over themselves to take issue with Trump calling Haiti a “sh**hole” are now saying it’s too much of a sh**hole for these people to be returned.
Meanwhile, a blatantly racist law was presented as support for the vampire rule, which predated the 14th Amendment and wouldn’t necessarily apply under Bruen anyway because of that, and somehow that’s the upsetting thing?
See, it’s not that the author here actually thinks Wolford was decided correctly. This is just an opportunity for him to compare apples to elephants without looking like he’s really defending racism of the past. So, he goes after the immigration decision and makes it like the court is cherry-picking when that’s not even close to what happened.
Trump’s comments aside, the law is the law here, and that law doesn’t care whether the individuals are Haitian or Polish.
I guess, in a way, this isn’t all that different from tearing down a statue of an explorer that you think was tied to racism despite having nothing to do with slavery or the slave trade. You’re making racism out of nothing while the rest of your bunch ultimately ignores some of the actual legacies of racism.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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