5 Democrat senators could be held in contempt of court for their abusive brief to the Supreme Court

David French:
I just finished reading of the most astonishing legal briefs I’ve ever read. It is easily the most malicious Supreme Court brief I’ve ever seen. And it comes not from an angry or unhinged private citizen, but from five Democratic members of the United States Senate. Without any foundation, they directly attack the integrity of the five Republican appointees and conclude with a threat to take political action against the Court if it doesn’t rule the way they demand.

The brief is so outside legal norms that, had I drafted it as a member of the Supreme Court bar, I’d be concerned about facing legal sanction for recklessly impugning the integrity of the Court.

Here’s the background. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Richard Durbin, and Kirsten Gillibrand filed their short brief in a case called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. the City of New York, the first Second Amendment case the Supreme Court has taken in nearly a decade.

If that sounds momentous, don’t be so sure. At issue is an extremely bizarre New York City law that banned the transport of a locked, unloaded licensed handgun outside the home unless the gun owner is traveling to one of only seven shooting ranges in the city. While the odds were remote that the Court would issue a sweeping Second Amendment ruling in a case involving a truly niche New York City law, it seemed likely that SCOTUS would strike down a regulation so strict that it prevented a person from taking his gun to a second home or even on a vacation to a jurisdiction that permitted him to arm himself.

And so — after fighting for its regulation through years of lower-court litigation — the city and state of New York changed their laws, slightly loosening the transport restrictions to allow a person to take their gun to a second home, a gun range, or a shooting competition outside the city. New York then filed a motion arguing that its legal changes rendered the petitioners’ claims moot. The New York Rifle and Pistol Association disagreed, arguing that even considering the city’s “miserly” changes, the city rules still violated the Second Amendment.

The ostensible purpose of the Democratic senators’ brief is to support the city’s claims that the case is moot and should be dismissed. Fair enough. Senators have the same rights as any other citizen to have their voice heard in the nation’s highest court, and mootness arguments are common when defendants change rules to evade judicial review.

The true intent of the brief, however, is to cast aspersions on the integrity of the Court itself. The senators ask the Court to dismiss the case to “stem the growing public belief that its decisions are ‘motivated mainly by politics.’” It then details how much money the NRA spent to support the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh (there’s no mention of the amount of money progressive groups have spent to support the confirmation of progressive judges), questions the sources of money funding amicus briefs opposing New York’s law, and then claims that if there were transparency, the petitioners’ “amicus army would likely be revealed as more akin to marionettes controlled by a puppetmaster than to a groundswell of support rallying to a cause.”

It gets worse. Read this remarkable paragraph:

From October Term 2005 through October Term 2017, this Court issued 78 5–4 (or 5–3) opinions in which justices appointed by Republican presidents provided all five votes in the majority. In 73 of these 5–4 decisions, the cases concerned interests important to the big funders, corporate influencers, and political base of the Republican Party. And in each of these 73 cases, those partisan interests prevailed.

Note that there is no concern expressed with lockstep voting by progressives. There is no acknowledgment that different justices have competing judicial philosophies. Nor is there any recognition that in hundreds of cases the philosophical divides are not so apparent, and that Democratic- and Republican-appointed justices vote together with striking frequency.
...
There is more.

These Democrats show real contempt for the integrity of the court and in particular the conservatives on the court who do not follow the liberal ideology of the Democrats.  The Democrats responsible for this travesty deserve a very strong rebuke.

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