Quote of the Day
With the conservative majority’s Second Amendment test requiring states to justify gun measures with historical analogues, Hawaii and other states have turned to the Black Codes to justify gun control efforts.
At Tuesday’s arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch and other conservative justices appeared reluctant to credit them given their racist origins.
Hawaii points to anti-poaching laws enacted near the nation’s founding and gun restrictions Louisiana passed in 1865 as part of its Black Codes.
“They wanted to disarm the Black population in order to help the Klan terrorize them and law enforcement officers in that period in that region. They wanted to put them at the mercy of racist law enforcement officers,” Justice Samuel Alito said.
“So is it not the height of irony,” he asked Katyal, “to cite a law that was enacted for exactly the purpose of preventing someone from exercising the Second Amendment right, to cite this as an example of what the Second Amendments protects.”
Katyal said he agreed parts of the Black Codes did exactly that.
Zach Schonfeld
January 20, 2026
Conservative justices reluctant to credit Black Codes in Hawaii gun law case
One has to be in awe of people capable of such mind warping ability that they use a racist and unconstitutional law as supporting the assertion their law is constitutional. Did they think appealing to racist laws would make it more a palatable to the conservative justices? If so, it backfired, but it did appeal to one of the justices:
“So I guess I really don’t understand your response to Justice Gorsuch on the Black Codes,” Jackson, a Biden appointee, told Harris. “I mean, I thought the Black Codes were being offered here under the Bruen test to determine the constitutionality of this regulation. And it’s because we have a test that asks us to look at the history and tradition.”
“The fact that the Black Codes were, at some later point, determined themselves to be unconstitutional doesn’t seem to me to be relevant to the assessment that Bruin is asking us to make.
I have given up trying to make sense of this argument. I have far more important things to do. I need to clip my fingernails.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is a straight-up DEI hire, in the most literal interpretation of the phrase. If she wasn’t black, she’d never have been considered for a judgeship, let alone the highest position in the land. She’s there because she will reliably carry water for her handlers, and inject random stupidity everywhere to help bread down our system of justice.
People like her are why in the old days they didn’t think blacks or women were smart, logical, or consistent enough to vote. Arguably, if she’s the best example of what they have to offer, she’s making a strong case they were right.
I think that is only half the story. Yes, she (like most of Biden’s appointees) is clearly a DEI hire. But even a DEI hire barely able to get a high school diploma would have a hard time making the sort of statement she made with a straight face.
Instead, it’s clear that part of the answer is that she is severely dishonest and an enemy of the Constitution.
So, the fact that the Black Codes survived as the supreme law of the land for X years, Hawaii gets that same number of years to infringe on its people’s right to keep and bear arms? Might I propose the number of years between Plessey v Ferguson and Brown vs Board of Education, et al, as a place to start the discussion.
Rather than giving Hawaii that same number of years, considering that Separate but Equal was stricken as a basis for making a law seventy years ago, the Supreme Court should school Hawaii’s lawyers (and their legislators AND the judges there, from the lowliest Small Claims Judge pro Tem to the Supreme Court Justices) how decisions from the higher courts and both precedent and Stare Decisis operate within the US judicial system.
They are welcome to read Bruen and the various other Second Amendment decisions as closely as they are able in order to discover a work-around, but they don’t get to use the laws those cases overruled as a basis to continue down their path to totalitarianism.
There are any number of laws in the antebellum south that could support their foray into cloud cuckoo land, but they are similarly gone with the wind and have no more jurisdiction now than a law from some country no longer found on the map.
I’m wondering about the possibility of using the Dred Scott decision, which after all was precedent too, as a way to justify removing KBJ from the court. 🙂
HAHAHAHAHA! Too Funny!!!!
It’s truly sad that they can only be removed for bad behavior.
Especially when a simple cognitive test (were it the law) would get her/it removed.
The true irony is that even after 1865 she wouldn’t have even been allowed to vote. Let alone sit in SCOTUS. As black men were allowed to vote long before white or black women were.
She proves our founder’s judgement correct with every word out of her communist yap.
Dredd Scott indeed! My sides are killing me!
Well, “bad behavior” includes perjury, and I would argue she certainly has demonstrated that (of her oath of office).
And once again we see the ignorance and outright lies communists will tell for tyranny’s sake.
And the fact that the court has fallen under the “word magic” of the communist argument.
I would ask again the grade-school level question.
“What exactly did the 2nd. AMENDMENT, amend?”
If not all those laws written before and after its adoption? If it doesn’t, then it isn’t an amendment. (And at this point it’s not even treated as a polite suggestion.)
Pure, plain, and simple. 2A is the law. Anything wrote before it was destroyed by it. Anything after it is not binding on anyone. (Except as proof of criminal activity by those in power.)
This should be the courts answer.
” If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may seem the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. ”
George Washington.
Every gun law wrote is nothing but usurpation. That should be the view of the court.
And we should demand nothing less from them.
One of the arguments the respondents made was that preventing people from being armed was part of the local culture, the “Aloha spirit”.
You know what else was part of the Aloha spirit? Slavery. The annexation of Hawaii was kicked off (in part) by a riot among the indentured servants (largely of Japanese extraction). While visiting the big island, I went to an interesting historical site where, in the local tradition, if a slave made it there without being captured, they got their freedom. Longstanding cultural traditions, that.
So… either specifically identifiable local cultural traditions ceased entirely when the territory came under US control and the limits on government power, or they didn’t. If the 2A doesn’t apply to Hawaii due to pre-annexation cultural sensitivities, neither does the 13A. Might want to go check on the 4A and 5A…
Or, stay with me, maybe you’ve heard this one before… the Constitution and its limiting amendments mean what they mean and nobody gets to “revisit” them without going through the amendment process where 34 states hold votes and ratify the “new understanding”.
What’s truly ironic is that by referencing laws that were used to disenfranchise Black Americans, these states are showing how far removed they are from the true spirit of the Second Amendment, which was meant to protect rights for all people.
She’s not totally off base (even though I would argue that she’s wrong);, she’s pointing out that the only (official) reason it got wiped off the books was because it singled out black people. Therefore, if it had been generally applicable it might still be on the books; in fact it might not even be unconstitutional (clearly at least some people did not consider it to be unconstitutional at the time). Therefore it could, at least in theory, be used to support a text/history/tradition argument under Bruen — even if it’s not consistent with the text, the other two are potentially still in play.
I think it’s a little thin, if not straw-graspy, but I can definitely see the (rather ironic) point that is being made.
And just like that, you made far more sense than she did.
I don’t *BUY* the argument, of course, but it’s at least… SOMETHING, as opposed to the silliness she spouted.
Actually, either way such laws would be unconstitutional, the only difference is the number of reasons why.
Any law disarming the people is invalid by the 2nd Amendment. If a Federal law, also by the 9th Amendment and Article 1 Section 8.
For the case of “black codes” there is an additional reason, the “equal protection” clause.
That a black woman would suggest a jim crow law (that was struck down as unconstitutional) be used as reason to violate the constitution again for a new gun-control law, is the absolute height of absurd stupidity, and she should be removed from the bench immediately.
You can’t possibly make a more erroneous decision or suggestion. Not only does it violate all common sense on the surface, the law in question was STRUCK DOWN, you can’t then use it as a precedence setting law, since it was deemed illegal..?!?!
Seriously, there are a lot of reasons why this stupid bint shouldn’t be anywhere near a traffic court, let alone the supreme court, but this is honestly sufficient cause for disbarment.