Today, Justice Neil Gorsuch threw a little shade at the Trump administration for unilaterally rewriting federal gun laws. "The agency used to tell everyone that bump stocks don't qualify as 'machineguns.' Now it says the opposite. The law hasn't changed, only an agency's interpretation of it," Gorsuch
wrote. "How, in all of this, can ordinary citizens be expected to keep up—required not only to conform their conduct to the fairest reading of the law they might expect from a neutral judge, but forced to guess whether the statute will be declared ambiguous….And why should courts, charged with the independent and neutral interpretation of the laws Congress has enacted, defer to such bureaucratic pirouetting?"
Gorsuch's statement came attached to the Supreme Court's denial of certiorari in
Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Damien Guedes, who challenged the legality of Trump's bump stock ban,
recently lost before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said the ban was entitled to judicial deference under the
Chevron precedent. The Supreme Court today declined to hear Guedes' case.
Gorsuch agreed with that. "Other courts of appeals are actively considering challenges to the same regulation," he wrote, and "before deciding whether to weigh in, we would benefit from hearing their considered judgments." But, he added, waiting for the right case to come along "should not be mistaken for lack of concern."
In fact, Gorsuch suggested, the right case could not come along fast enough. "The law before us carries the possibility of criminal sanctions," Gorsuch wrote. "Before courts may send people to prison, we owe them an independent determination that the law actually forbids their conduct. A 'reasonable' prosecutor's say-so is cold comfort in comparison."
abcnews.go.com
