The nine members of the Supreme Court peered over a precipice.
They could apply their two-year-old gun-rights precedent, as a lower court had, and declare unconstitutional a federal law aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of individuals under court-issued restraining orders for domestic violence.
If they endorsed such an extreme outcome, they knew, they would be taking down not only a 30-year-old law but also perhaps even the court itself, already at a near low in public esteem.
But it’s impossible to see the outcome in United States v. Rahimi as anything other than an exercise in institutional self-preservation.
While Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion garnered eight votes, five members of his majority felt impelled to express their own contrasting if not exactly conflicting views in separate opinions.
Persons:
Clarence Thomas, John Roberts’s
Locations:
United States