The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge this week to the constitutionality of a federal law that bans the possession of a firearm by someone who has been the subject of a domestic violence restraining order.
The court holds that when an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to another’s physical safety, that individual may be temporarily disarmed, consistent with the Second Amendment.
The vote is 8-1, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that, “Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms. As applied to the facts of this case, Section 922(g)(8) fits comfortably within this tradition.”
Discussing the application by the lower courts of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Roberts writes, “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.”
Otherwise, Roberts explained, the Second Amendment would only protect “muskets and sabers.”
“Why and how the regulation burdens the right are central to this inquiry. For example, if laws at the founding regulated firearm use to address particular problems, that will be a strong indicator that contemporary laws imposing similar restrictions of similar reasons fall within a permissible category of regulations.”
The Supreme Court has been busy lately.
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will review the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants living in the United States.
The development comes as the president aims to fulfill his promises of strict immigration enforcement during his second term in office.
For the time being, the justices upheld two lower court orders that prevent the Trump administration from immediately ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrian and Haitian migrants. However, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the consolidated cases on an expedited basis and announced that it will hear oral arguments in both cases next month, Fox News reported.
The outlet added that a final ruling is expected sometime in June.
The news comes as the Trump administration has taken steps to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for migrants from about six countries. This includes approximately 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians currently residing in the United States under the program.
The TPS program allows individuals from certain countries to live and work legally in the U.S. if they are unable to return safely to their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
Last week, Solicitor General D. John Sauer requested that the Supreme Court intervene and stay a lower court order issued by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes. Her order blocked the administration’s attempt to immediately revoke the TPS designations for Haitian migrants, Fox noted.
Sauer urged the Supreme Court to consider the larger question of whether the Trump administration has the authority to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for other migrants living in the U.S. He pointed to the Justice Department’s appeal of a similar case concerning TPS protections for Syrian migrants, which was brought before the Supreme Court earlier this year.
“Unless the court resolves the merits of these challenges — issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide — this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this court’s interim orders,” Sauer said last week. “This court should break that cycle.”
Haitians were first granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 2010 following a devastating earthquake that resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 people and left approximately 1.5 million homeless in the country.
The protections have been extended multiple times, including under the Biden administration in 2021, after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s last democratically elected president, in July of that year.