Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. I’m writing to you a day early this week, ahead of the Juneteenth holiday on Friday.
Fresh off the Trump administration’s Iranian agreement, let’s go back to early March, right after the U.S. and Israel struck the Middle Eastern nation. That’s when the Supreme Court heard argument in United States v. Hemani. Technically, Iran had nothing to do with the legal issue in the case, which was whether the Second Amendment barred the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani under a federal law disarming anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”
But the administration highlighted an Iranian connection in pressing the justices to take up Hemani’s case. In its petition, the Justice Department said that the dual U.S.-Pakistani citizen had “drawn the attention” of the FBI, and that he was “poised to commit fraud at the direction of suspected affiliates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps” and had “traveled to Iran to participate in a celebration of the life of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general and terrorist who had been killed by an American drone strike.”
What did any of that have to do with the Second Amendment? Gun rights advocates had the same question. They warned the justices not to fall for what they saw as an underhanded litigation tactic of the government: “handpicking unsympathetic criminal defendants to justify its preferred gun control.” Groups led by Gun Owners of America said the court should “decide the easy question presented and ignore the Government’s irrelevant character assassination.”
The court did just that on Thursday, when all nine justices sided with Hemani. “The charge had nothing to do with terrorism,” Justice Neil Gorsuch observed in his opinion.
The Trump appointee all but laughed out of court the claim that gun restrictions on “drunkards” at the time of the nation’s founding justified disarming Hemani for using marijuana a few times a week. The government’s position “extends equally to a husband who regularly takes his wife’s prescription Ambien to sleep and a college student who routinely uses a friend’s Adderall to cram for exams,” Gorsuch said. He concluded that the government’s stance “fails under every measure it asks us to consider: The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways.”
Gorsuch didn’t go so far as to cite “Reefer Madness” in dismantling the administration’s argument. But he pointed out the increased acceptance of marijuana, including by this administration, which has loosened some restrictions on the drug. Against that backdrop, he said the government asked the court to deem regular users “categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing.” He said the request was made based on “little more than its current say-so” and was “at odds with its own regulatory actions.”
Given the lopsided lashing joined by GOP and Democratic appointees alike, why was this the case the administration brought to the court? Indeed, Gorsuch wondered at the March hearing, “Why is this the test case?” To the extent that the DOJ was banking on “irrelevant character assassination” to help it win with an otherwise weak argument, it was a losing strategy.
Hemani’s case was one of three the court handed down on Thursday. The next batch is set for release on Tuesday, with birthright citizenship and many more important rulings due before the court breaks for summer.
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