You have to hand it to Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Their marriage is an exemplar of spousal teamwork. Ginni Thomas worked hard on the inside game for Donald Trump's coup: exchanging emails with Trump co-conspirator John Eastman, pressuring state legislators to throw out electors that President Joe Biden won and blitzing Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows with potential coup strategies. Meanwhile, her husband just handed the Trump's volunteer street fighters, the sort of folks that stormed the Capitol on January 6, a Supreme Court decision that will make it much easier for them to arm themselves with heavy firepower in the future.
The radical implications of Thursday's Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, in which the Supreme Court struck down New York's strict regulations on who can carry guns in public, are only starting to be understood. As Slate's legal expert Mark Joseph Stern wrote, this decision doesn't just strike down restrictions on concealed carry in some of the largest states in the country, it's "a maximalist opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that renders most of the nation's gun control laws presumptively unconstitutional." The gun safety bill that President Joe Biden signed Friday is frustratingly limited in scope, but even its modest efforts to keep guns out of the hands of unstable people may not pass this new court test laid out by Thomas.
