One of the unspoken rules of the US supreme court is that the justices will never admit that they were wrong, and no one else is allowed to admit it, either.
Last week, in oral arguments in United States v Rahimi – which asks whether it is constitutional to take guns away from men who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders – the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, had to dance around this rule very delicately as she represented the federal government. The federal law disarming abusers had been thrown into question by a ludicrous and dangerous test for all gun restrictions that the supreme court instituted in its 2022 Bruen decision, one which makes it difficult to impose new gun laws if those laws aren’t sufficiently similar to ones on the books from either the revolutionary or civil war eras.
