Judging Freedom - Federal court strikes down Trump-era bump stock ban.

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, January 9th, 2023. It's about 3.30 in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Over the weekend, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, that's Texas and Louisiana, that's the intermediate federal appeals court between the district court, the trial level, and the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, struck down a rule promulgated by the Trump Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Concerning Bump Stocks. All right, here's the background. You may recall the awful, horrible, horrendous slaughter of innocents at a rock concert in Las Vegas about three or four years ago, where a crazy guy got on the balcony of one of the large hotel rooms. He had smuggled his rifle into his hotel room in bits and pieces and assembled it in there

and began murdering people by shooting them from the balcony. He affixed to his rifle an item called a bump stock. Now, a bump stock is a device which when you hold it on with your arm, the arm of your trigger finger, it will allow you to expel more than one bullet per trigger pull. Bump stocks are legal in the United States in response to this killing. Instead of Congress invalidating bump stocks, which in my view would be unconstitutional, but Congress does things like this. The Trump Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms issued a rule saying that bump stocks turn a regular semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun. And as we all know, machine guns have been banned everywhere in the

United States since 1934. I'm sure the government has them, but they've been banned absolutely since 1934. Various pro-gun right groups challenged this, saying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms can't declare something to be a machine gun, only Congress can. And a federal district court judge, excuse me, in Texas threw out the challenge and said, no, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms promulgated the rule and they can write the rule. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sitting in New Orleans, it covers appeals, as I said, from federal courts in New Orleans and in Texas, invalidated that. Now, this is not a ruling on the merits. This is not a ruling saying that bump stocks are legal. This is a ruling saying

that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms can't write the law and can't declare something to be a machine gun that Congress didn't declare to be a machine gun. So this is basically a victory over the administrative state. The administrative state, all those administrative agencies, the FDA, the EPA, the CDC, Centers for Disease Control, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all these aspects of the government that are neither fish nor fowl. They're not in the legislative branch. They're not in the executive branch. They write their own rules. They enforce their own rules. They assess their own punishments. They adjudicate their own rules. They interpret their own rules. They do something similar to

all three branches of the government. They do something similar to the Congress. They write rules. They do something similar to the executive branch. They enforce rules. They do something similar to the judicial branch. They interpret rules. Fifth Circuit said, forget about it. This is not something that an administrative agency can do. if adding some pieces of metal and plastic to a rifle, turn it into a machine gun and thereby make it unlawful. This is a great ruling. It is the beginning of a lot of changes for us, not just on guns, but on all these administrative agencies, because there is a doctrine called the Chevron Doctrine. It's named after the oil company because their name was in a case. And that case says the courts should give deference to administrative agencies when they interpret their own rules. That, of course, gives the administrative agency the upper hand. You come into court, you're supposed to be equal. The

administrative agency and the people suing it. the Chevron doctrine, the administrative agency has a leg up. Lately, the courts have been saying, get rid of Chevron. Not only should the administrative agency not get deference from us, it should be below the person it's suing because it is not elected. It does not answer the people. It just writes its own rules and tells us we have to follow them. What kind of an American system is that? The Fifth Circuit did not go that far, but the same Fifth Circuit has been critical of Chevron. This is a slap in the face to the Chevron doctrine.

And when this case gets to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will repeal the Chevron doctrine, which will be an enormous setback for the deep state and the bureaucrats who run the administrative agencies and try and tell us how to live. In the meanwhile, you can put a bump, unless it's prohibited by state law, you can put a bump stock on your rifle and make it more efficient. Judgment Paul Tano for judging freedom.