Guns, Weed, and the Forgotten Framers

The Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling this week in United States v. Hemani, holding that a marijuana user cannot be stripped of his Second Amendment right to own a firearm simply because he sometimes uses cannabis. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, leaning heavily on the founders' own well-documented love of alcohol to argue that responsible substance use has never historically disqualified Americans from bearing arms. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern unpack the ruling, note what it does not settle about the still-murky Bruen test, and reflect on how dramatically the justices’ posture toward marijuana has shifted since the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case they decided less than two decades ago.

Then, Dahlia sits down with David Gans, director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center, to discuss his forthcoming Stanford Law Review article, Forgotten Framers: Black Conventions and the Second Founding. Between 1864 and 1869, Black Americans gathered in more than fifty conventions in packed churches and meeting halls across the country to demand equal citizenship, voting rights, bodily autonomy, protection from racial violence, and access to education. These conventions molded the Reconstruction amendments in ways that originalist jurisprudence ignores.

Gans explains how the Roberts court's colorblind reading of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments distorts this history by ignoring the explicitly race-conscious vision the conventions—and the amendments themselves—championed. He also explains how the Guarantee Clause, long a "sleeping giant," could still offer a constitutional path to combat partisan and racial gerrymandering after Calais and Milligan. Gans wrote about this facet of the history recently in Slate.

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