Supreme Court ruling in 1A case: 1A and NRA win

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Haven't had time to actually read the opinion, so this is superficial. Will try to write more details when I have time, perhaps this evening.

The NRA had sued over being "harassed" by NY state insurance regulators, on 1A grounds. The Supreme Court just ruled in favor of the NRA, with an unanimous ruling authored by Sotomayor. That statement is already interesting: in a case with political implications (a dispute between the ultra-MAGA conservative NRA and the ultra-liberal NY department of insurance), we get an unanimous ruling. And the ruling in favor of a right-wing group is written by the liberal standard bearer among the justices.

The newspaper summary say that the government can't regulate organizations differently depending on their political speech. I'll try to get the details tonight.

If the headlines are accurate, I see this as a great win: for free speech and the first amendment. Which I consider to be the most important part of the US constitution.

 

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Correction: The ruling is much less definitive than I thought. In a nutshell, when it first came out this morning, the newspaper headlines looked like the Supreme Court decided that the state of NY did indeed restrict the NRA's 1A rights to free speech, by threatening insurance companies.

That's not what this case is about. Instead what happened was that the federal appeals court said that the NRA's case is so weak that it can't even start. The Supreme Court just stated that no, the NRA's case is plausible, but it has a giant hurdle it has to get over (whether the person in NY had qualified immunity or not). So no, until the lower courts rule in accordance with this guidance, we don't actually know for sure whether the NRA's 1A rights were violated or not.