A friend of mine is a lawyer for DOJ and he indicated to me that lower courts do try to suss out where SCOTUS is going and rule accordingly. I don’t believe th

A friend of mine is a lawyer for DOJ and he indicated to me that lower courts do try to suss out where SCOTUS is going and rule accordingly. I don’t believe this ruling would have been made if recent SCOTUS rulings were different. I have not talked to him about this case and we don’t talk legal stuff much so he may have just been humoring me with my perception that lower courts try to suss out where the winds are blowing. One can use precedents and case law to pretty much argue anything (within reason) since there are enough contradicting rulings over the last 200 years. In mathematical logic terminology the Constitution and legal precedents together do not form a consistent system. Thus a lot of this stuff comes down to what is in fashion today so to speak. Judge Napolitano wrote an argument on why secession is a right of each state and wrote an argument for why this wasn’t specifically written in the Constitution. A lot of this stuff is just making shit up or selectively using precedents to justify a desired conclusion. One can do this in an inconsistent system.