I spent the past week reading the decisions handed down by our supreme court, and I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the institution of the supreme court is a political branch of government.  It's members are appointed by the president and approved or rejected by whichever political party controls the senate at the time.  This was most obvious during the end of the Obama and the beginning of the trump presidencies when the senate made up the lame excuse not to  even consider an appointment so close to an election, only to reverse that position in order to squeeze one more "conservative" person onto the court  at the end of the trump presidency.  Winning is everything. To reframe the world in one's image is, for some, the greatest achievement of life. Mitch McConnell can die a happy man if he does so soon.  There are always unintended consequences.  No dictator, king, government, or court has any legitimacy without  willing supporters. How many are necessary is a function of the size of the general population, the technology available to monitor that population and the degree of brutality to which the supporters are willing to go in support of the regime.  ( The British were apparently the first empire to use the concentration camp as a means of pacification, made  possible during the Boer wars by the perfection of the machine gun and barbed wire, which allowed a small armed group to watch over a large group of disarmed civilians.)  When the majority of Americans no longer feel that the supreme court "interprets" our constitution in a way that we each perceive benefits us, then we will ignore it's edicts.

    In one of the opinions, the legal principal of  "stare decisis" was expounded upon. (The idea that the long standing decisions of previous courts would be upheld by succeeding courts.    I think it was Gorsuch who stated that although the court did give weight to previous long standing( now "long" must be more than 50 years.) decisions, this court refuses to be hamstrung by bad decisions. This is why the court overturned the Chevron decision, ( The notion that in cases of ambiguity in the law, the court would differ to the judgment of the agency experts in the field governing the law) which, in it's opinion , was wrong from the beginning.Since, as thomas pointed out in his opinion, the APA grants the judiciary sole authority in deciding matters of law, i.e. what a set of words actually means and whether it reflect what the congress intended when making those words law. The APA was enacted in 1946 and the  Chevron decision was issued in 1989, so  how could the two courts look at the same laws ( a set of words) and come to opposite conclusions? Those 18 people have probably come through prestigious schools, no Abe Lincolns, all having access to the exact same documents and historical materials, and yet they are on opposite sides of an issue. How can one better demonstrate that the court is nothing more than the personal opinions of 9 individuals who use history as they will, or not, to justify their pronouncements, gathered loosley around that document we call the Constitution".

thomas is right about one thing.  The mechanism of the bump stock does not match exactly the mechanism of a machine gun described in the statute, and cannot therefore be restricted, even though the effect of using a bump stock can result in the rapid fire that true machine guns demonstrate. It is the sole fault of the congress for not passing a law banning the device.  On that score, I can find nothing in the second amendment that says that crazy people or even felons can be denied the right to own a gun. It just isn't there, so why are these textualists and originalists allowing the government to restrict any gun ownership? It does not matter that society might be safer if these people were restricted, the wording of the law does not allow for any restriction.

If the FBF gets reelected, the world is going to change in ways that no one can predict. I will make a few predictions though. The FBF will throw Ukraine to Putin, then Moldova and Estonia, etc. Then pressure will be put on Poland. The FBF will pardon himself and all those enablers that have been convicted of crimes.  He will fire all federal employees that do not sign a loyalty oath to him specifically. He will unfund or disband all federal watchdog agencies.He will use the federal government to ascertain who his detractors are and they will be harassed from their positions in universities and other institutions that have a public profile. He will close down news outlets that oppose him.  Many of those who have been found guilty of crimes against the government will be appointed to positions of authority, and that is when the rape of the country will begin, like during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the oligarchs divided up the country's wealth. The food you eat, the air you breath, the medicine you take, the things you buy will all be buyer be ware. Capitalism will reign supreme.