Brett Kavanaugh Promised This Ruling Would Make Judges Less Partisan. Guess How That Went!

This story was published in partnership with the Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. But a new analysis by the Trace of more than 1,600 Second Amendment rulings filed in the wake of Bruen found that, instead of limiting judges’ discretion as Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices predicted, the decision has made federal courts even more of a political battleground, where gun laws rise and fall along partisan lines. “Judges have always disagreed, but what’s different now is that those disagreements are more often falling along partisan lines than they have in the past.” Voters will head to the polls in November to select the next president, who may get to nominate hundreds of judges and appoint replacements for the two eldest Supreme Court justices—Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—influencing the federal courts for decades. “There just aren’t a lot of guardrails with Bruen, and it becomes a kind of choose-your-own-adventure situation where judges can decide how to answer very open questions,” said Megan Walsh, a visiting assistant professor and the director of the Gun Violence Prevention Law Clinic at the University of Minnesota. “We’re in a world where judges now have to make those determinations, and it’s requiring them to analyze sources and make decisions that are frankly unfamiliar.” Related From Slate Federal Judge Shoots Down Ron DeSantis’ War Against Free Speech Fogel, the former federal judge, said most judges want to decide cases fairly and apply Bruen correctly, but the test provides too many opportunities for them to inject their implicit assumptions or biases, even unintentionally.