Guns for All, Privileges or Immunities for None

The hearings in McDonald v. Chicago promise an unrevolutionary victory-but still an important one

Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the big laugh line of the hour at Tuesday's Supreme Court hearings in McDonald v. Chicago. That case's outcome will decide whether the Second Amendment rights vindicated in 2008's D.C. v. Heller apply to states and localities. Scalia amused the crowd by asking a question that has perplexed some legal scholars and gun activists both for and against McDonald lawyer Alan Gura's general goal of applying Second Amendment protections to all levels of American government.

To get the joke, such as it was, you first need the background about what was at stake. The Bill of Rights was originally interpreted to bind only the federal government. The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to change that, and bind the states as well in respecting Americans' rights. This was in 1868, when recently freed slaves had their rights to work, own property, and bear arms widely abused and unprotected by state and local governments.

The history of the 14th Amendment's passage indicates that a certain part of the amendment was meant to bear the interpretive burden of applying—"incorporating" in the legal lingo—the Bill of Rights (and other restrictions on government power) to the states. That was the Privileges or Immunities Clause: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."

Since a controversial 1873 Supreme Court decision in a set of cases regarding a slaughterhouse monopoly in Louisiana, known as the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Privileges or Immunities Clause has been pretty much interpreted out of existence. The Supreme Court has instead used the vaguer and less textually sensible "due process of law" provision of the same amendment to incorporate certain rights against the states. Using that tool, the Court over the past century has already incorporated most of the Bill of Rights on the states, and some unenumerated rights as well. Gura elected to reverse this trend by arguing for incorporation of the Second Amendment on privileges or immunities grounds.

So Scalia asked Gura early in his 20 minutes of argument time on Tuesday: "Mr. Gura, do you think it is at all easier to bring the Second Amendment under the Privileges and Immunities Clause than it is to bring it under our established law of substantive due…process?… Why are you asking us to overrule 150, 140 years of prior law, when—when you can reach your result under substantive due—I mean, you know, unless you are bucking for a—a place on some law school faculty…?"

Scalia, reputedly a constitutional originalist, flashed some ugly colors with that laugh-provoking comment: He'd rather go with the easy precedential flow—even given a substantive due process argument that he openly admits he thinks is wrong but which he's "acquiesced" to—then vindicate the actual intentions of the framers of a very important constitutional amendment.

Gura undoubtedly went for a daring gambit on privileges or immunities (in addition to, not at the expense of, the more traditionally successful due process argument). He did so, first, because he thought it was the correct argument based on constitutional language and history. But he, and many other legal scholars, was also excited because a revival of privileges or immunities could give courts new power to restrict states and localities from violating other rights much on the minds of the 14th Amendment's framers.

Gura quoted some of them, from the 1866 Civil Rights Act: "To make and enforce contracts…to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property." A properly grounded application of the privileges or immunities clause could help vindicate the sort of economic liberties considered out of fashion and meaningless in the higher courts since the early 20th century days of the Lochner case.

While nothing is certain until the decision (or decisions) come down later in the year, the general consensus is that Gura has at least the same five justices who revived the Second Amendment in Heller prepared to apply it to the states via the Due Process Clause. This includes Scalia, despite his expressed doubts about the validity of due process incorporation in general. Thus, Gura and the McDonald team win.

Gura cast his mission so ambitiously, though, that he may have created an unfortunate public relations problem for his team. His impending victory might be spun as a defeat. There were elements in the gun-rights community, including the National Rifle Association (NRA) (who won argument time for their advocate Paul Clement at the hearings even though McDonald was not their case), who thought Gura reached for too risky a victory for economic and other liberties when he should have kept his eye on the Second Amendment ball. The NRA's Clement kept it simple, insisting before the court that "Under this court's existing jurisprudence, the case for incorporating the Second Amendment through the Due Process Clause is remarkably straightforward. The Second Amendment, like the First and the Fourth, protects a fundamental preexisting right that is guaranteed to the people" and thus should be incorporated against the states just as those other amendments were.

In his half hour before the justices, Chicago's counsel James Feldman maintained that, since guns can hurt people, localities' power to protect public safety should allow them to regulate guns as much as they want. Not wanting to re-argue Heller (unlike Justice Steven Breyer, who is still obsessed with the militia clause as presumptively dominating the purpose of the Second Amendment, contra Heller), Feldman asserted that a fundamental right to self-defense might exist, but that right was not infringed fundamentally by the banning of any specific variety of weapon, as Chicago did with handguns. Scalia wondered why Feldman seemed to think an unwritten right to self-defense existed that states should honor when he didn't think that the written right to keep and bear arms had to be thusly honored.

The confused and random jumble of issues and concerns that flowed out in the hour at the Court shows that, while using due process may be the easiest way out for lazy justices who don't want to think freshly or step outside a middle-of-the-road consensus, the inherent vagueness of due process makes actual legal reasoning hard—unnecessarily so, given the clearer set of historical concerns about privileges or immunities that were on the minds of the Republicans who pushed the 14th Amendment in the late 1860s.

The absurdity of legal reasoning unmoored from the historical understanding of liberty rights was apotheosized in Breyer's reference to a "Madison Chart," in which we decide on how much judicial respect various rights would be granted by imagining James Madison ranking their importance on a chart. Breyer avers, apparently consulting Madison's shade, that guns for the militia would be listed high on the chart, high above guns to shoot burglars. (Jokes about the "Madison Chart" ought to be law school staples down the line.)

The various justice's particular and often eccentric concerns further muddied any discernible lines of logic at the hearing. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a poorly conceived swipe at any originalist understanding of what rights the Privileges or Immunities Clause might guarantee by stressing the claim that women didn't have the right to own property or have occupations separate from their husbands in 1868. (Meaning they wouldn't now either if Gura won on privileges or immunities grounds?) Both she and Justice Anthony Kennedy tried to dredge a precise answer from Gura as to exactly what rights were protected by his conception of the clause, which he wouldn't and couldn't do. That the Constitution was designed to protect the people's liberties through limiting government's power and not listing citizens' rights is not an idea much at the front of the justices' minds.

Justice John Paul Stevens made it clear again and again that even if incorporated against the states, a Second Amendment right could and even ought to be restricted to the narrowest version of Heller: commonly used weapons for self-defense in the home. Even Scalia made it clear that he doesn't think state level restrictions on concealed carry would necessarily be in danger under an incorporated Second Amendment, and both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Kennedy made it clear that an incorporated Second Amendment does not mean a Second Amendment whose reach was as wide as the gun rights community might like. Roberts spelled it out like this: The Second Amendment "is still going to be subject to the political process if the Court determines that it is incorporated in the Due Process Clause. All the arguments [Chicago's lawyer Feldman made] against incorporation it seems to me are arguments you should make in favor of regulation under the Second Amendment. We haven't said anything about what the content of the Second Amendment is beyond what was said in Heller."

That's worth remembering as we wait for the decision and its aftermath. In the usual media scrum outside the courtroom as the hearings let out, the Brady Center's Paul Helmke was OK with losing complete bans on commonly used weapons such as Chicago's, but insisted most (though he denied many even existed) local gun regulations are sensible public safety measures and would certainly survive future legal challenges even if Gura wins. The NRA's Paul Clement cagily refused to say what sort of lawsuits the NRA might file challenging other state gun regulations in the event of a McDonald victory. 

The future of gun rights, then, is brighter than before, though not as bright as the most tenacious defenders of self-defense rights might like. But what of the future of the Privileges or Immunities Clause? It seems as if the clause arose, goosed by Gura, from a grave that Slaughterhouse had sealed it in, only to promptly have a stake driven through its heart and its head chopped off and then shoved back in to the grave by the decidedly unfriendly approach of the justices. In the pre-hearing debate over whether privileges or immunities had a chance in McDonald, the very fact the court took up Gura's case as opposed to a simpler due process case from the NRA also up for consideration led some to assume the Court must have wanted a chance to seriously rethink the issue. The evidence from Tuesday morning showed no sign of such interest in privileges or immunities.

However, at a Hill briefing by three privileges or immunities scholars and advocates on Wednesday—Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice, Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute, and Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation—the mood was still defiant, not defeated.

To roughly summarize a set of arguments I heard this week in interviews and at that briefing on the future of privileges or immunities, just as Progressive-era legal doctrinal victories such as "rational review" evolved over generations to overtake the profession, a rising group of younger litigators and legal scholars are united in agreeing that Slaughterhouse was an embarrassment and must go. And scholars and advocates from different sides of the political spectrum, for different reasons, are eager to see privileges or immunities arguments become an active part of the arsenal for courts and lawyers. (Some progressives see in it a stronger chance to cram various welfare rights into the Constitution, though more libertarian fans of the clause think the clearer historical record makes the clause a weaker, not stronger, tool than due process by which to work such legal mischief.)

But no matter what the consensus is, a privileges or immunities victory will eventually have to be won in the Supreme Court, and in my read there is at best one person on the current Court who would vote for it. Justice Clarence Thomas, silent as always in this week's hearings, has in the past expressed an interest in rethinking privileges or immunities. There's a strong expectation on the part of some privileges or immunities fans that Thomas will write a concurring opinion uniting in the holding that the Second Amendment is incorporated, but with a separate set of privileges or immunities-based reasoning that could become a rallying flag for future arguments about the clause's continued value. However, what sort of case might be on the horizon to bring it back before the court is unclear. What seems clear is that at least four justices have to go and be replaced by jurists friendly to the abandoned clause for it to become a meaningful part of American jurisprudence. We will have the privileges or immunities fight with us for a long time to come.

On the night of the hearings, I stepped outside the constitutional debate, and glimpsed the heart of why such high-level abstractions matter—the reason why the Supreme Court was even listening to these arguments. Cases have plaintiffs, and plaintiffs are people. At a reception sponsored by one of the case's institutional plaintiffs, the Second Amendment Foundation, I met the lead plaintiff, Otis McDonald.

Otis McDonald will be the man—as a plaintiff—who vindicated the rights of every American who doesn't live in a federal enclave to, at the very least, have adequate means to try to protect their lives, families, and property from violent danger. He'll go down in the history books, to be sure, this 76-year-old man with a wife and eight kids.

He's black, which is appropriate for both public relations and for history. It ties the arguments Gura made on McDonald's behalf to why the 14th Amendment exists: to guarantee that people of his color would have the liberties and protections white Americans of the time were supposed to have enjoyed. As Gura declared right at the start of his presentation to the Court, "In 1868, our nation made a promise to the McDonald family that they and their descendants would henceforth be American citizens, and with American citizenship came the guarantee enshrined in our Constitution that no State could make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of American citizenship."

Let me tell you something else about Otis McDonald: If you are lucky enough to meet the guy, you're going to love him. Really. In about a half hour of conversation, both one-on-one and in a small group, the guy was devastatingly charming, in a completely unstudied way. He's compelling and convincing and real, telling quotidian stories about being late for planes and late-night fishing; and equally so when getting historical and cosmic about the arc of his life and the role he knows he's playing in his country's history. One minute laughing and light, the other giving a sincerely tear-jerking account of the pride and gratitude he feels toward everyone else, especially the younger generation, advancing the scholarship and advocacy of his and his fellow Americans' rights. After that half hour, I was on this guy's side, just as a fellow human being. And a dream client for a civil rights case like this to boot, as the lawyers present agreed enthusiastically.

That the city of Chicago prevents this man from making the best choice available to him to protect himself and his family from the very real threats that surround him is, simply and with no constitutional history or theory required, wrong. It is a wrong that Gura's arguments on Tuesday will likely right. And while libertarian legal scholars (and some leftist ones) may feel dejected that Gura failed to win the Court over to the wisdom of overturning Slaughterhouse, McDonald, his fellow plaintiffs, and the rest of Chicago will because of his efforts be able to exercise a core human right unmolested. That is great news, news whose importance should not be clouded by the specifics of how it was won.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man (BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute).