Letters from an American - June 14, 2024

Episode Date: June 15, 2024

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June 14th, 2024. Today, former President Trump turns 78. For his birthday, Representative Greg Stubbe, a Republican of Florida, introduced a bill to name 4,383,000 square miles of the coastal waters off the United States, over which the U.S. has sole authority, a region called the Exclusive Economic Zone, the Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States. A less welcome present was that the chief executive officers who attended a meeting with Trump in Washington yesterday told reporters they found him uninformed and unfocused. laws, its price caps on drugs and medical products, and its promise of progressive tax policy, and like Trump's promise to slash regulations and cut taxes. So they went into the meeting hoping to support him. One CEO left the meeting with a takeaway that Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. And several, Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC reported, said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, and was all over the map. He could not explain how he planned to accomplish

any of the policies he was proposing. When asked why he had chosen a policy of bringing the corporate tax rate down to 20%, he allegedly answered, well, it's a round number. No one applauded Trump, attendees reported, in striking contrast to reports of the enthusiasm of Republican lawmakers yesterday. This difference underscores that Trump likely intended yesterday's grandstanding to send a political message that Republican members of Congress support him despite his criminal convictions, while the lawmakers themselves were trying to show party unity at a time when they are bitterly divided. Also today, the Supreme Court handed down the Garland v. Cargill decision, which considered whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, correctly determined that a device that dramatically

increases the speed at which a semi-automatic weapon fires bullets, called a bump stock, could be prohibited under the law, originally passed in 1934, that outlawed machine guns. By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court said the ATF did not make that decision correctly and that bump stocks were not banned under the law. After the Parkland, Florida shooting of February 14th, 2018, when the gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, then President Trump told reporters that he had been studying the issue of gun safety. This was his first articulated policy on that issue. And although the Parkland shooter did not use a bump stock, Trump said he had told then Attorney General Jeff Sessions to write

regulations to ban bump stocks in October of the previous year, after a gunman using them had fired up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes, killing 58 people and wounding about 500. Two died later at a Las Vegas music festival. By the time the ATF finalized the new rule on December 18, 2018, Sessions was gone, and it was Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker who announced that bump stocks would be classified as a machine gun under federal law. The rule went into effect on March 26, 2019. People who owned bump stocks had to get rid of them, either by destroying them or by taking them to an ATF office. The ATF estimated that about 520,000 bump stocks needed to be destroyed. A Texas gun store owner, Michael Cargill, handed over his two bump stocks under protest

and then sued the ATF, saying it did not have the authority to reclassify bump stocks. Today, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court dove deep into the mechanics of bump stocks to try to establish that they were not physically machine guns, and that because of differences in the mechanical operations between true machine guns and bump stocks, the law did not prohibit bump stocks. true machine guns and bump stocks, the law did not prohibit bump stocks. ATF officials thus had no business defining bump stocks as they did in 2018, and those who want them can own them. In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machine guns.

Congress can amend the law and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act. Indeed, if Congress truly reflected the will of the people, it would have acted on this issue years ago. A Pew poll from June 2023, when bump stocks were illegal, showed that 64% of Americans want assault-style weapons banned altogether, as they were between 1994 and 2004. But Republicans have increasingly fetishized guns as a symbol of individualism, and Republican senators have kept most gun safety legislation at bay by weaponizing the filibuster, which means that any legislation must have not simply a 51-vote majority to pass the Senate, but 60 votes.

In other Supreme Court news, yesterday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, released documents showing that Justice Thomas accepted at least three more trips from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crowe than had previously been known. And in other news concerning our nation's horrific history of mass shootings and the political meaning of guns, history of mass shootings and the political meaning of guns. Today, a federal judge ordered the liquidation of the personal assets of conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones to begin the payment he owes to the families of the 26 people, 20 of them between the ages of six and seven, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. For years, Jones told his followers that the shooting was a hoax to encourage restrictions on gun ownership,

prompting harassment of the victims' families. A jury in Texas and a jury in Connecticut awarded the families $1.5 billion in damages for defamation. Jones owns about $9 million of personal assets but will keep his $2.8 million home in Texas. The judge threw out an attempted reorganization of Jones's company, Free Speech Systems, saying Jones's creditors would recover more money in state courts. The families have sued Jones for hiding millions of dollars in assets. Reacting to the news of the Supreme Court's decision in Garland v. Cargill, gun safety advocate David Hogg,

who survived the Parkland shooting, wrote, ah yes, because who doesn't need the ability to freely turn a semi-automatic AR-15 into what in effect is a machine gun. This is effing insane. We know thoughts and prayers are not enough, President Biden said in his own statement about the Supreme Court's decision, referring to the usual response of Republicans after a mass shooting. I call on Congress to ban bump stocks, pass an assault weapons ban, and take additional action to save lives. Send me a bill and I will sign it immediately. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.