Last week, an en banc panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the executive branch of the federal government is not permitted to make up the law as it sees fit simply because public sentiment has been outraged by a tragedy. Thirteen judges joined the majority opinion, with three opposing them in dissent.
Superficially, the stakes of the case were concrete. It had a plaintiff: Michael Cargill. It had a couple of defendants: Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Steven Dettelbach, the director of the ATF. And it had a live legal controversy: whether the ATF’s 2018 decision to ban bump stocks was consistent with either the 1934 National Firearms Act or the 1968 Gun Control Act. But, at its heart, the case was about the nature and the integrity of written law. In Michael Cargill v. Garland, et al., the Fifth Circuit upheld the notion that we write our laws down for a reason, and that, if we wish to alter the meaning of those laws, we must choose words other than the ones of which they are currently composed.
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