SCOTUS NEWS

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sent a challenge to a Pennsylvania law barring people 18- to 20-years-old from carrying guns back to the lower courts for another look in light of last term’s decision in United States v. Rahimi, in which the justices attempted to provide guidance for courts reviewing Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun rights. The announcement came on a list of orders from the justices’ private conference last week.

The justices did not add any new cases to their docket for the 2024-25 term.

In Paris v. Lara, Pennsylvania had appealed in a challenge to a state law that effectively bars 18- to 20-year-olds from openly carrying a gun when Pennsylvania has declared a state of emergency. In a decision issued in June 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit barred the state from enforcing the law, reasoning that the words “the people” in the Second Amendment “presumptively encompass all Americans, including 18-to-20-year-olds, and we are aware of no founding-era law that supports disarming people in that age group.”

Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Michelle Henry, told the justices that the Supreme Court’s June 2024 decision in Rahimi had “abrogated the Third Circuit’s analysis.” In Rahimi, the court upheld a federal law that bans anyone who is the subject of a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. In reaching that holding, Henry noted, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that even if the modern regulation being challenged “does not precisely match” laws restricting gun rights in early English or U.S. history, “it may still be analogous enough to pass constitutional muster.” Henry urged the justices to send the case back so that the 3rd Circuit could reconsider it in the wake of the court’s decision in Rahimi, and on Tuesday the justices did just that.

The justices on Tuesday also turned down a petition asking them to decide whether an indigent defendant who is represented by a public defender has the same constitutional right to continued representation by his initial court-appointed lawyer as a defendant who has retained his own lawyer.

The justices did not act on several petitions for review from the long list of petitions that accumulated over the summer, which they first met to discuss on Sept. 30. These petitions involve topics ranging from where challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s actions under the Clean Air Act should be filed to a challenge to the admissions program at three of Boston’s elite public high schools.

The justices will meet again for another private conference on Friday, Oct. 18.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court. 

This fall, more than half of the House districts have only one candidate on the ballot.

Among the Republican targets in the House is Rep. Frank Burns, a Cambria County Democrat who has somehow stayed in office despite facing biennial GOP challenges in the very Republican Johnstown area. Another is Rep. Jim Haddock, a freshman Democrat who won a Lackawanna and Luzerne district by about 4 percentage points two years ago.

Democrats have hopes of unseating Rep. Craig Williams, R-Delaware, who made an unsuccessful bid for the GOP’s attorney general nomination this spring. Outside Pittsburgh, Rep. Valerie Gaydos is also seen as relatively vulnerable.

Rep. Nick Pisciottano, a Democrat, is giving up his Allegheny County district to run for state Senate. Rep. Jim Gregory lost the Republican primary to Scott Barger, who is unopposed in a Blair County district. Brian Rasel, a Republican, faces no other candidate to succeed Rep. George Dunbar, R-Westmoreland.

Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia, is unopposed for reelection but he’s also running for auditor general, raising the possibility the two parties could be tied after the votes are counted.

The state Senate races widely seen as the most competitive are the reelection efforts of Sen. Dan Laughlin, R-Erie, and Sen. Devlin Robinson, R-Allegheny. Dauphin County Sen. John DiSanto, a Republican, is not seeking another term after his district saw significant changes through redistricting. State Rep. Patty Kim, D-Dauphin, and Nick DiFrancesco, a Republican and the Dauphin County treasurer, are facing off to succeed DiSanto.

Democrats have to defend a Pittsburgh state Senate opening because of the retirement of Sen. Jim Brewster, a Democrat. Pisciottano is going up against Republican security company owner Jen Dintini for Brewster’s seat.

BUTLER, Pa. — Two men who were shot during the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump this summer say the U.S. Secret Service was “negligent” in protecting the former president and other bystanders at the campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

David Dutch, 57, an ex-Marine, and James Copenhaver, 74, a retired liquor store manager, told NBC News in an exclusive interview Monday they were excited to be sitting in the bleachers behind the Republican nominee at the fairgrounds in Butler on July 13 when gunshots rang out and they were hit.

Another man, Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed in the shooting while shielding his family. Trump was wounded in the ear.

The interview with the two Pennsylvania men who were critically injured marked their first public statements since 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire in July from an unsecured rooftop nearby before he was fatally shot by sharpshooters.

“It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer right in the chest,” said Dutch, who served in both Desert Shield and Desert Storm in his time with the Marines from 1986 to 1992. He said he could see chunks of the bleacher and metal “flying all around” until the shooting stopped.

Dutch said Monday he was still “angry that the whole situation even happened. It should have never happened.” NBC News reported the two men’s attorneys said they were looking into possible litigation over what they view as negligence by the Secret Service.

“It wouldn’t have happened, had it been secure,” Copenhaver said.

Kimberly Cheatle, director of the Secret Service at the time, called the attempt on Trump’s life at the Pennsylvania rally the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.” She stepped down this summer after lawmakers called for her to resign.

Trump returned earlier this month to the Pennsylvania fairgrounds where he was nearly assassinated in July, urging a large crowd to deliver an Election Day victory that he tied to his survival of the shooting.