The Biden administration sued Missouri in federal court in Kansas City on Wednesday over the state’s bonkers attempt to nullify enforcement of federal gun laws here. The plainly unconstitutional state statute has already had the predictable result of hampering crime-fighting efforts. Yet state Attorney General Eric Schmitt is, in his typically grandstanding way, vowing to defend the statute, declaring: “The law is on our side.”
Perhaps Schmitt has lost his copy of the Constitution. Article 4, Section 2 plainly dictates that when federal and state law are in conflict, federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” The passage contains no asterisks allowing ideological extremists in a state to blithely declare some federal laws unenforceable because that’s what their base wants to hear.
Yet that’s what Missouri’s ruling Republicans did last year with passage of the so-called Second Amendment Preservation Act. The act says that any federal gun law that doesn’t have a corresponding law in Missouri statutes cannot be enforced within the state, with the threat of expensive judgments against any police agencies that do.
