Sonia Sotomayor Points Out How Quickly the Conservative Justices Will Drop Their Stated Principles When It Suits Them (2024)

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” —Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent from the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Garland v. Cargill

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is calling bullsh*t on her conservative colleagues’ rationale for throwing out a 2018 ban on bump stocks, the device used to modify the gun used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting—the deadliest in modern U.S. history. The Trump administration reclassified guns with bump stocks as machine guns, thereby banning the device’s use under a 1934 law that heavily restricts access to machine guns.

In Sotomayor’s dissent in Garland v. Cargill, which Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan joined, she called out how her conservative colleagues had basically bent over backwards to redefine the legal definition of a “machine gun.” She noted that these linguistic gymnastics are particularly galling given how much conservative jurists claim to prize textualism—a theory that stresses adhering closely to the plain text of the law and to the ordinary meaning of words.

To drive the point home, Sotomayor came with receipts: She quoted past opinions where each one of the conservative justices in the majority had stressed the importance of textualism—and, specifically, a focus on the ordinary meaning of statutes.

“Every Member of the majority has previously emphasized that the best way to respect congressional intent is to adhere to the ordinary understanding of the terms Congress uses,” wrote Sotomayor, who then cited passages from past opinions where John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett all stressed the importance of textualism. “Today, the majority forgets that principle and substitutes its own view of what constitutes a ‘machine gun’ for Congress’s.”

Congress banned machine guns almost a century ago through the National Firearms Act and, as Sotomayor pointed out, has since updated it to expand the definition of a machine gun to include “any weapon which shoots, or is designed to shoot, automatically … more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The federal definition also encompasses “any part designed or intended” to enable automatic fire, which bump stocks plainly are.

Sotomayor cited several dictionary definitions to support her reading of the law and drew attention to the way the majority went out of its way to impose a new, bizarre understanding of the words Congress used. “The majority looks to the internal mechanism that initiates fire, rather than the human act of the shooter’s initial pull, to hold that a ‘single function of the trigger’ means a reset of the trigger mechanism,” Sotomayor wrote. “Its interpretation requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text.” (Yes, they even included a GIF to back up their argument.)

In this way, the conservative justices’ use of textualism mirrors their use of originalism: Both are supposedly strict philosophies for interpreting law that give them cover to do whatever they want when it suits them. Originalism—the theory that the Constitution must be interpreted through the lens of its original meaning at the time of ratification—has also been misused to put America on a path away from common-sense gun reform, as Jill Filipovic explained in a essay for Slate: “Since 2008, the court has radically departed from centuries of case law on gun regulations and the Second Amendment, making it astoundingly difficult for lawmakers to implement even the most basic and commonsense of gun laws.”

But Sotomayor stressed that the meaning of words does matter. “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” wrote Sotomayor. “A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.”