Bizarro Court

The Supreme Court handed down two opinions yesterday. Something weird about both:

Exhibit 1: Small v. United States. One Gary Small had served three years in a Japanese prison on firearms violations. He came back to the United States and bought a gun. Busted! U.S. law says you can't possess a firearm if you've been "convicted in any court" of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison.

Voting to overturn Small's conviction were most of the liberals: Breyer writing the majority opinion, joined by Stevens, O'Connor, Souter & Ginsburg. Scalia and Kennedy joined Thomas in dissent.

The disagreement involves a Clintonian disagreement about what the word "any" means. To the majority, the law really reads "convicted in any U.S. court." To the dissenters, it has no assumed qualifier.

Exhibit 2: Pasquantino v. United States. This is a strange-bedfellows case, with Thomas writing for a majority including Rehnquist, Stevens, O'Connor and Kennedy. Ginsburg's dissent was joined by Breyer, Scalia and Souter.

At issue here is whether bootleggers carting booze to Canada can be tried in the United States for evading Canada's tax laws.

Taken together, we have liberals taking a narrower than warranted reading of the word "any" to overturn a weapons violation; and the conservatives taking a broader than warranted view of the wire fraud statutes to uphold a conviction enforcing Canada's tax laws.

I don't think the odds-makers cleaned up on today's decisions.