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Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, wrote: Justice Scalia is the most sarcastic justice on the Supreme Court. He has been for at least the last thirty years, and there is good reason to believe no other Justice in history has come close to his level of sarcasm. Now your first reaction to this claim, if you are a (sarcastic) Supreme Court aficionado or reader of the Green Bag (the two categories overlap almost perfectly), is probably: “Well, duh!” And your second reaction is likely: “Oh really? Well how can you prove that?”

In a recent dissent, Justice Scalia declared: 'Today’s tale . . . is so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution. But reaching a patently incorrect conclusion on the facts is a relatively be- nign judicial mischief; it affects, after all, only the case at hand. In its vain attempt to make the incredible plausible, however – or perhaps as an intended second goal – to- day’s opinion distorts our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence and leaves it in a shambles. Instead of clarifying the law, the Court makes itself the obfuscator of last resort.'

ustice Scalia has remarked that “Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its Members.” In a civil rights case, he ended his dissent by stating that “The irony is that these individuals – predominantly unknown, unaffluent, unorganized – suffer this injustice at the hands of a Court fond of thinking itself the champion of the politically impotent.” In a gender discrimination case, he wrote: “Today’s opinion is an inspiring demonstration of how thoroughly up-to-date and right-thinking we Justices are in matters pertaining to the sexes (or as the Court would have it, the genders), and how sternly we disapprove the male chauvinist attitudes of our predecessors. The price to be paid for this display – a modest price, surely – is that most of the opinion is quite irrelevant to the case at hand.”

More recently, Scalia had some snarky things to say in his opinion on the Affordable Care Act case, which he has redubbed SCOTUScare, and on hippies who support gay marriage.

Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia, of the Western Judicial District of Texas, was notified about the death from the U.S. Marshals Service.   

"I was told it was this morning," Biery said of Scalia's death. "It happened on a ranch out near Marfa. As far as the details, I think it's pretty vague right now as to how," he said. "My reaction is it's very unfortunate. It's unfortunate with any death, and politically in the presidential cycle we're in, my educated guess is nothing will happen before the next president is elected."

The U.S. Marshal Service, the Presidio County sheriff and the FBI were involved in the investigation.Officials with the law enforcement agencies declined to comment. A federal official who asked not to be named said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared that Scalia died of natural causes.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement Saturday afternoon, calling Scalia a man of God, a patriot and an "unwavering defender of the written Constitution." "He was the solid rock who turned away so many attempts to depart from and distort the Constitution," Abbott said. "We mourn his passing, and we pray that his successor on the Supreme Court will take his place as a champion for the written Constitution and the Rule of Law. Cecilia and I extend our deepest condolences to his family, and we will keep them in our thoughts and prayers."

In the 1980s, when he was a lower court judge, Justice Scalia began to champion a competing view of statutory interpretation, textualism, which holds that judges should confine themselves to interpreting the words that Congress chose without trying to discern Congress’s broader purposes.

Textualism, in this view, promises to constrain judicial activism by preventing judges from roving through legislative history in search of evidence that supports their own policy preferences. But in the view of its critics, like Chief Judge Katzmann, textualism “increases the probability that a judge will construe a law in a manner that the legislators did not intend.”

Judge Katzmann, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, also accuses Justice Scalia of inconsistency for consulting the intent of the framers in the case of constitutional interpretation but not statutory interpretation.

The chief justice’s embrace of bipartisan judicial restraint in the second Affordable Care Act case was consistent with his embrace of the same philosophy in the first Affordable Care Act case in 2012, where he quoted one of his heroes, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: “The rule is settled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”

Chief Justice Roberts was not, as Justice Scalia charged, rewriting the law. Instead he was advancing the view that he championed soon after his confirmation: In a polarized age, it is important for the Supreme Court to maintain its institutional legitimacy by deferring to the political branches.

Chief Justice Roberts’s relatively consistent embrace of judicial deference to democratic decisions supports his statement during his confirmation hearings that judges should be like umpires calling “balls and strikes.” As he put it then: “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”

Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?

Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.

Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board

In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. The nationalism, and the delusion.

Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.

The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.

The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power.

recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.

Even before William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” the modern conservative movement has struggled to reconcile the ethno-nationalism that moves masses of its voters with the pluralism embodied in the notion that all persons are created equ

Mr. Obama was ultimately drawn to a cluster of ideas known as civic republicanism or deliberative democracy, Mr. Kloppenberg argues in the book, which Princeton University Press will publish on Sunday. In this view the founding fathers cared as much about continuing a discussion over how to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom. Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

You would think that the ruling of a conservative legend such as Scalia would provide courage to Republicans who want to end the epidemic of mass shootings. Or they could stand with Ronald Reagan. His pleas to lawmakers helped lead to the 1994 ban on assault-style weapons .

After losing to the Gipper, NRA lobbyists in Washington lost their minds. They all but declared war on America’s government while comparing law enforcement officers to Nazis. These “jack-booted government thugs” wanted to “take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure or kill us.”

GOP politicians and the gun lobbyists they represent live in a bubble. Their indifference to the massacres of innocents will lead to their political ruin. Then, and only then, can we have an honest debate on the epidemic of guns in America.

despite the obstacles she faced in the legal profession as a woman.

“Justice did not arrive like a lightening bolt, but rather through dogged persistence, all the days of her life,” said Rabbi Hotlzblatt, whose husband clerked for Justice Ginsburg from 2014 to 2015. “Real change, she said, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

Only about 30 Americans have received the honor of lying in state at the Capitol: presidents, military leaders and members of Congress, all of them men. Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon, is the only other woman granted a similar honor, but as a private citizen, she lay “in honor.”

The first viewing slots were reserved for the women serving in Congress; Democratic and Republican women were to gather later on the steps of the Capitol as her coffin is carried out.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, were notably absent from the proceedings,

He dropped to the floor before her coffin and did three full push-ups.

After Justice Ginsburg saw her first opera — a condensed version of “La Gioconda” in 1944, when she was 11 — she was immediately hooked, becoming the kind of aficionado who went to dress rehearsals, then opening nights and then closing nights, too, for good measure.

It was a love she shared with Justice Antonin Scalia, her Supreme Court colleague, friend and ideological antagonist; an opera, “Scalia/Ginsburg,” was written in 2015 about their relationship

White House officials and Senate Republicans busied themselves on Friday with preparations of their own to usher in a conservative successor to the Supreme Court with remarkable speed

6-to-3 conservative majority on the court in reach, Republicans were aiming for a vote before Election Day, just over a month away.

“The chants were appalling, but certainly to be expected when you’re in the heart of the swamp,” she said. “I thought it was an appalling and disrespectful thing to do, as the president honored Justice Ginsburg.”

Mr. Trump has angered many supporters of Justice Ginsburg by quickly announcing that he would nominate a new conservative justice to succeed her before the election in November, and by questioning, without evidence, whether her “dying wish” that another president appoint her replacement was real or concocted by top Democrats.

“I give great credit to the chief justice, who I think in general is a person who is concerned about consensus building, and I think all the more so now,

Opinions vary about whether a Supreme Court that does little is good for the nation, but the trend is certainly a testament to Chief Justice Roberts’s leadership. He has long said he favors narrow decisions endorsed by large majorities, and it turns out that goal is easier to achieve on an eight-member court. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

The justices will continue to issue decisions in most cases, but many will be modest and ephemeral, like Monday’s opinion returning a major case on access to contraception to the lower courts for further consideration.

“Yesterday’s contraception case shows why an equally divided court among liberals and conservatives has many benefits for our country, and also why the sky-is-falling claims by many court watchers about an eight-member court are overstated,”

“This type of consensus decision making,” Professor Segall said, “is a welcome change from the normal political and sometimes partisan approach we normally see in important 5-4 opinions, where one side can impose its own agenda on the parties and the country.”

forcing public workers to support unions they had declined to join violated the First Amendment. Justice Scalia’s questions were consistently hostile to the unions.

Four days before he died, the court blocked the Obama administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s conservatives in the majority.

The court has three major decisions left to decide before the justices take their summer break: on abortion, immigration and affirmative action.

All of this term’s blockbusters were added to the court’s docket before Justice Scalia died. Since then, the justices have agreed to hear just seven cases, and none of them concern issues of broad public interest

The next term, which starts in October, is thus shaping up to be a thin and quiet one. Until the next justice arrives, the Supreme Court will remain on the sideline of American life

History is alive, and she has a lot to teach us. I quote William Faulkner (what history professor hasn't?) who famously declared: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

History is not a deck of cards from which to randomly draw for comparative purposes. It is an immense repository of human thinking, doing, and being that can and should help us be slightly less narrow-minded and shortsighted than our forefathers and foremothers sometimes were. Good uses of history require more substance, unpacking, and analysis than a few quick sound bites can provide.

People aren't always sure what to do with history. But the laziest use is to make facile comparisons between then and now, this person and that.

Mostly these comparisons are shallow and not rooted in any depth of meaningful knowledge of the past. They rely on caricatures and selective historical tidbits in a way that, indeed, just about anyone can be compared to anyone else.

These comparisons tend to come in two forms: those meant to elevate, and those meant to denigrate. Both use historical comparisons to accomplish their goals

By associating their 21st-century political agendas with the 18th-century American rebels, modern Tea Partiers collapse the distance between then and now in order to legitimize their cause.

Slavery is another popular go-to comparison. But ... sorry, Kesha: Recording contracts are not like slavery. And Republicans: ”Neither is the national debt, Obamacare, income tax, or gun control. Or the TSA, global warming, or Affirmative Action.

In fact, presidential hopeful Ben Carson's comparisons to slavery were so common that he was parodied as suggesting that even buying a Megabus ticket is like slavery (which, sadly, is almost believable).

History as critique, honest assessment, and self-examination. Thinking long and hard about the treatment of Native Americans, past and present. American imperialism. Slavery, and its intertwining with the rise of modern capitalism. Xenophobia. Suppression of women's rights. These stories need to be told and retold, painful as they may be.

People who make historical comparisons don't actually believe that Ted Cruz is like Robespierre. But then why bother? The reason there aren't longer expositions of how exactly Trump is like Hitler is because, well, very quickly the analogy would break down. Male ... popular ... racist ... oh, never mind. These analogies are usually politically motivated, shallow, and intended to shock or damn. It's just lazy, and more politics as usual.

When we say that Trump or Obama is like Hitler, we slowly water down our actual knowledge of the very historical things we are using for comparison. When people link their frustration with the Affordable Care Act or gun control to slavery, they greatly diminish the historical magnitude and importance of a horrific historical reality that irreversibly altered the lives of 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans who were forced across the Atlantic to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries. Scholars speak of a "social death" that came from the incredible violence, emotional damage, and physical dislocation that took place during the Middle Passage and beyond.

The GOP's current crisis mirrors the French Revolution? Ted Cruz is like Robespierre? Please. You are granting way too much historical importance to the self-implosion of a political movement that rose to power over the past 30 years on a platform of moralistic piety, militarism, anti-abortion, and xenophobia.

One charitable reading of why people make these comparisons is that they fear we will end up in unpleasant and unfortunate situations that are like past circumstances. Behind the charge of Trump being a fascist is the fear that Trump, if elected president, will rule unilaterally in a way that oppresses certain segments of the population.

The only problem is that history really doesn't repeat itself. If anything, it remixes themes, reprises melodies, and borrows nasty racist ideologies. There are no exact historical analogs to today's politicians — jackasses or saviors.

"History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes." And it is in the rhyming that history still plays an important role.

Historian William Bouwsma once noted that the past is not the "private preserve of professional historians." Rather, he argued that history is a public utility, like water and electricity. If Bouwsma is right, the kind of history most people want is like water: clear, available at the turn of a knob, and easily controllable. But really, history is more like electricity shooting down the string of Franklin's fabled kite: wild, with alternating currents and unexpected twists, offshoots, and end results.

Voting for Trump won't bring about an American Holocaust, but it could usher in a new yet rhyming phase of history in which US citizens and immigrants from certain backgrounds are targeted and legally discriminated against, have their civil liberties curtailed, and even get forcibly relocated into "safe" areas. Hard to imagine?

American history, as Jon Stewart brilliantly reminded us, is at its core a series of events in which the current dominant group (no matter how recently established) dumps on the newest immigrant group. Catholics. Jews. Irish. Asians. They've all been in the crosshairs. All of them have been viewed as just as dangerous as the current out-group: Muslims.

Flippant comparisons also belittle and ignore the way that historical trauma creates immense ongoing psychological pain and tangible collective struggle that continues through generations, even up through the present.

If simplistic comparisons cheapen the past and dumb down our public discourse, using the past to understand how we got to where we are today is actually productive. It increases knowledge, broadens our perspective, and helps connect dots over time.

If Americans truly want to understand this GOP moment, we need not look to revolutionary France, but to the circa-1970s US, when the modern Republican Party was born. I know, Republican pundits like to call themselves the "party of Lincoln," but that is mostly nonsense

To compare Trump to Napoleon or Hitler is to make a vacuous historical comparison that obscures more than it reveals. But it is actually constructive to try to understand Trump as a fairly logical outcome of some of the cultural impulses that drove the moral majority and the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells us how we got here and, potentially, how to move forward.

Done well, history gives us perspective; it helps us gain a longer view of things. Through an understanding of the past we come to see trends over time, outcomes, causes, effects. We understand that stories and individual lives are embedded in larger processes. We learn of the boundless resilience of the human spirit, along with the depressing capacity for evil — even the banal variety — of humankind.

The past warns us against cruelty, begs us to be compassionate, asks that we simply stop and look our fellow human beings in the eyes.

Why, then, is Obama-Washington still on my office wall? Mostly to remind me of the irony of history. Of its complexity. That the past might not be past but is also not the present. It is a warning against mistaking progression in years with progress on issues. It is a reminder that each one of us plays an important part in the unfolding of history.

Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it. Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship.

As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”

In 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

Scalia declared that “a person who is required to put his name to a document is much less likely to lie than one who can lie anonymously.”Scalia concluded: “I can imagine no reason why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity.”

For 80 years it has been the practice that the Senate has not confirmed any nomination made during an election year, and we shouldn’t make an exception now.8

Biden — and this is not something we’ve said very often — was absolutely correct.10 It’s a political cauldron to avoid.11 There should be no hearings. There should be no confirmation.12 Not during a presidential election year, with millions of votes having been cast in highly charged contests.13

This year is a tremendous opportunity for our country to have a sincere and honest debate about the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system of government.19

The Supreme Court seat doesn’t belong to any president or any political party.24

Our view is this: Give the people a voice.30

in the long arc of the Limbaugh era, you can see pretty clearly how success and self-marginalization can be effectively combined.

Reaganite conservatism in ’80s America was a 55 percent proposition, popular with younger voters, with only a mild version of today’s yawning gender gap.

But you don’t need 55 percent of the country to build a huge talk-radio audience or an incredibly successful cable news network or a vast online ecosystem. You need a passionate audience, a committed audience, a church of Dittoheads.That was what Limbaugh built for himself

then everyone else on the right went in the same direction: First, Limbaugh’s talk radio imitators, then Roger Ailes with Fox News, and then — disastrously — a great many Republican politicians, who realized that an intense ideological fan base was enough to win them elections in safe districts and might make them media celebrities in the bargain.

This pattern created problems that compounded one another. As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump

These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one.

And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.

Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible

to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.

In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.

the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.

Dan McLaughlin, in an instructive piece for National Review, counts Limbaugh as one of the right’s five most important 1990s-era figures, along with Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Antonin Scalia

as they grew old within the right’s infrastructure, Limbaugh and Ailes and Newt and Rudy all seemed to cede their individuality and converge into a single character, a single noisy voice.

Which were the media impresarios and which were the political leaders? Which one was married four times, which ones only three, which was the office predator? Which one was most likely to say something indefensible in defense of Donald Trump?

Only Scalia, secure from certain temptations in his lifetime judicial appointment, retained both his individuality and his outward-facing influence to the end.

For the rest, for Limbaugh especially, we can say that their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.

A New York City law regulated where licensed handgun owners can take a locked and unloaded handgun, but it was changed before the court would rule after supporters of gun regulations feared the justices would take an idiosyncratic state law and use it as a vehicle to expand upon Heller. But conservative justices were clearly unhappy with how lower courts were deciding Second Amendment cases.

Five of the 10 cases the court is looking at ask justices to determine whether the Second Amendment allows the government to restrict the ability of citizens to carry a firearm outside the home to those with "good cause" or "justifiable need" to do so.

The law "effectively bars ordinary, law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense," Paul Clement, a lawyer for Rogers, said in court papers. Clement is a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

In court papers, New Jersey said it has not "banned carrying a firearm in public; instead, the State has carefully limited public carrying to those individuals with a need to do so."

We hope the court will consider the issue of carry outside the home, as the lower courts have ignored existing Supreme Court precedent regarding the right to bear arms," said the NRA's Amy Hunter.

The plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, including two firearm dealers and the Gun Owners' Action League, claim that the law is contrary to the decision in Heller, in which Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that Washington, DC's ban on handgun possession in the home "violates the Second Amendment."

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said the state's ban is on "weapons with distinct military origins that are used disproportionately in mass public shootings and killings of law enforcement officers."

The court also previously declined to weigh in on challenge to a Chicago suburb's ban on semiautomatic firearms with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds of ammunition in 2015.

Kavanaugh testified at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2018 that he based his opinion on the Heller decision. "This is all about precedent for me," he said and noted that Scalia had said that dangerous and unusual weapons could be prohibited. Kavanaugh said it's "very important to recognize under the Heller decision that machine guns can be prohibited" but he continued that the ban at issue "seemed to fit common use and not being a dangerous and unusual weapon."

one case challenges the federal ban on out-of-state handgun purchases. The plaintiff, Frederic Russell Mance, Jr. attempted to sell handguns to Tracey and Andrew Hanson, who were residents of the District of Columbia, in Texas. However, federal law generally makes it illegal for a licensed firearms dealer to sell any firearm to a person who does not reside in the same state.

Pena v. Horan concerns California's Unsafe Handgun Act, requiring new models of semiautomatic handguns manufactured or sold in the state to include certain safety features.

"When the court will take another gun case, what it will be, and what the court will decide is all guesswork," said Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel and vice president of pro-gun safety organization Brady: United Against Gun Violence. "They could grant cert in these cases as soon this week, or soon after, and we will be ready to ensure that Americans' right to life is not infringed upon by the gun industry."

"The bottom line is that is that the American public overwhelming supports gun safety laws and what we've seen over the last two years in statehouses across the country lawmakers are responding to that," he said. "So the gun lobby is looking to the courts."

The more pressing concern many of us had about Mr. Trump is that he simply isn’t up to the job of being president.

Last weekend Mr. Trump gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he said his administration would quickly put out its own health proposal, which would cover everyone now insured and cost much less.

The extraordinary and unenviable task facing the White House staff is to contain Mr. Trump, to keep a dysfunctional president from producing a dysfunctional presidency.

Beyond that, Mr. Trump has continued to demonstrate impulsivity and narcissism, an affinity for conflict and vindictiveness. Which leads to my main worry about Mr. Trump: His chronic lack of restraint will not be confined to Twitter. His Twitter obsessions are a manifestation of a deeper disorder.

He thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage. He is a shock jock. This might be a tolerable (if culturally coarsening) trait in a reality television star; it is a dangerous one in a commander in chief.

For Mr. Trump, nothing is sacred. The truth is malleable, instrumental, subjective. It is all about him. It is always about him.

When President Trump is buffeted by events — when hard times hit, when crises arise, when other politicians and world leaders do not bend to his will — pernicious things will happen.

Rather than try to address the alienation and anger that exists in America, he will amplify them. He’ll create yet more conspiracy theories.

He will also go in search of enemies — the press, the opposition party, other nations, even Republican leaders — in order to create diversions that inflame his most loyal supporters.

In failing to distinguish between the good of the nation and his own vanity, the danger is that Mr. Trump will fail to see the limits of his authority and will try to use both the bully pulpit and the power of government — the I.R.S., the F.B.I., regulatory agencies and others — to settle personal scores. He’ll do what he needs to in order to get his way.

What this means is that Republican leaders in Congress need to be ready to call Mr. Trump on his abuses and excesses, now that he is actually in office.

They need to ask themselves a simple, searching question: “If Barack Obama did this very thing, what would I be saying and doing now?” — and then say and do it.

man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.

“I mean, what would you do if you were Roberts? All of a sudden you find out that the people you thought were your friends have turned against you, they despise you, they mistreat you, they leak to the press. What do you do? Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, ‘What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics.’ Right? Maybe you have to reexamine your position.”

The difference is especially notable, legal experts say, because Democratic presidents have generally avoided nominating passionate liberals, while Mr. Bush did not shy away from putting strong conservatives in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia on appellate courts.

Republicans have done so mainly through delays at almost every stage of the process, not by voting down waves of nominees.

one of the most fascinating aspects of the net-neutrality fight is how often it has remained non-partisan. Indeed, its advocates seem to have pulled off one of the more fascinating feats in recent American politics. They have created great public interest, formed a massive coalition, in and around a rules change by a federal regulatory agency.