Maine’s new, three-day waiting period on gun purchases passed the Legislature by the slimmest possible margin last year and narrowly averted a veto from Democratic Gov. Janet Mills.
Now, gun rights advocates think the law could become the vehicle to erase waiting period laws in Maine and roughly a dozen other states.
The new law faces its most significant challenge yet after a federal judge suspended the required three-day wait just six months after it took effect. The legal landscape on guns has shifted dramatically since conservatives solidified their majority on the nation’s highest court. And the outcome of Maine’s fight could have national ramifications for states with similar “cooling-off periods” before gun buyers can take possession of that new hunting rifle, 9 mm handgun or AR-15.
“This could create precedent for the next hundred years on whether waiting periods are constitutional,” said David Trahan, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, an influential gun owners’ rights group.
Supporters say the law will prevent impulsive homicides but more often prevent suicides, which account for nearly 90% of gun deaths in Maine in many years. But opponents regard it as a blatant violation of the Second Amendment that could cost the lives of people who want a gun to protect against an imminent threat.
Judge Lance Walker, the chief judge for the U.S. District Court in Maine, agreed with the latter, at least on first blush.
“Citizens wishing to purchase a firearm are dispossessed of one for 72 hours exclusively by operation of the act’s requirement that everyone be subjected to a ‘cooling off’ period, even those who have passed an instant background check at the (firearms) dealer’s counter,” Walker wrote. “That is indiscriminate dispossession, plain and simple.”
Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey appealed Walker’s decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Speaking one day after the judge’s ruling, Trahan said he looked forward to the appeal.
“We have the funding to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Trahan, whose side is getting legal and financial support from the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. “And if that happens, this will get settled for over 20 states. And if it gets … reinforced at the Supreme Court level, all of those laws will then be null and void.”
Gun control advocates, however, counter that this issue has been well-litigated nationwide. And federal courts have consistently upheld other states’ waiting period laws as constitutional.
“Even after Bruen, every other court has upheld these … so we do view this as an outlier decision that we think will be corrected at the Court of Appeals,” Billy Clark, a senior attorney at Giffords Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for and defends gun regulations.
Clark’s reference to “Bruen” is important here because that’s the case — New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, to be exact — through which federal courts now view many gun cases, including waiting period laws.
In Bruen, the Supreme Court struck down parts of New York’s so-called “concealed carry” laws. But the conservative majority also set a new standard for gun laws. Since Bruen, restrictions on guns should be consistent with “historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In other words, new laws should have historical precedents or analogs.
Second Amendment defenders have used that decision as grounds to challenge gun laws across the nation. And while Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a more recent case that Bruen doesn’t mean the nation’s gun laws were set in “amber” by the founding fathers, the ruling has forced lawyers, judges and policymakers to dive deep into historical law books to find fitting precedents.
So where do waiting periods fit into all of this?
Roughly a dozen states plus Washington, D.C., require gun buyers to wait anywhere from three to 14 days to retrieve a gun. Maine’s three-day waiting period law is the newest of the lot. But since the Bruen decision, federal judges have upheld the constitutionality of waiting period laws in Vermont, Colorado and New Mexico.
That’s why Clark called Walker’s decision “an outlier.”
“This is the first decision we’ve seen post-Bruen to strike down a waiting period law,” Clark said. “Every other court … upheld these laws because they’ve found that a brief waiting period — you know, we’re talking about a 72 hour waiting period here — does not implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment. There’s nothing in the Second Amendment itself that provides a right to a gun on-demand. And those courts have also found that these waiting periods are consistent with historical tradition.”
The Maine Attorney General’s Office asked Walker this week to reinstate the three-day waiting period while the appeals process plays out. The office declined to comment while it awaits that decision.
In 2018, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case challenging California’s 10-day waiting period, thereby allowing the law to stand. But that was pre-Bruen and before conservatives solidified their majority on the court.
Meanwhile, one of the heavy-hitter attorneys representing the challengers to Maine’s law, Paul Clement, is the lawyer who argued (and won) the Bruen case before the Supreme Court.
GOP: Cuts for thee, not for me
The Trump administration’s brazen push to gut and reshape the federal bureaucracy has faced little pushback from the Republican-controlled Congress. Its concerns have largely been rhetorical and so far there has been no organized effort to reassert or leverage its constitutional power of the purse.
However, as the effects of those cuts become real back home, some GOP politicians are asking Trump for exemptions that would spare their states from the slashing bonanza.
Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, joined that effort last week alongside N.H. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Both senators urged the Department of the Navy to provide an exemption for federal employees at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to the deferred resignation program initiated by billionaire Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
“The men and women who work at our public shipyards are critical members of our defense industrial base, without whom the ability to repair, retrofit and refuel our country’s submarines would be in jeopardy,” the senators wrote.
More than 68% of the 11,285 federal workers in Maine work in the defense industry, including at PNS, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
The appeal from Collins follows a pattern of other Republicans requesting exemptions. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, recently warned that gutting USAID foreign aid programs would hurt farmers in his state who sell their crops to the government to feed impoverished people in other parts of the world (Now that USAID has been through Musk’s “woodchipper,” Moran is proposing to move the aid program to the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Meanwhile, Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy has lamented that Trump’s cuts to the FBI will hurt his state.
The list of Republican lawmakers (and FOX News personalities) asking for a reprieve is expansive and it raises questions about how the Trump administration plans to evaluate the requests or what, if anything, it might ask for in return.
Collins’ concerns about federal employees at PNS follows her worries about billions of cuts to National Institutes of Health grants, which one scientist says will cripple biomedical research in Maine (Other Republicans are worried about those, too). She told Maine Public that part of her reason for voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is that he told her he would reevaluate those NIH cuts.
And speaking of Trump’s controversial moves …
A new poll suggests that Maine voters aren’t just “deeply divided” over Trump’s first few weeks in office. They are diametrically opposed, at least among Republicans and Democrats.
An astonishing 98% of people who described themselves as Republicans approved of Trump’s presidential performance so far. Meanwhile, just 1% of self-identified Democrats approved of the president, with 98% disapproving and 1% unsure, according to the poll this month by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
Self-identified Democrats had a similar revulsion to Elon Musk, with 98% calling his role “inappropriate” and 0% falling in the “appropriate” category. Republicans were a bit more divided but still overwhelmingly in favor of the billionaire turned “government efficiency” enforcer, with 87% describing his role as “appropriate” and 11% still not sure.
As expected, Maine’s unenrolled or independent voters fell in between the Dems and GOPers in the survey. But it’s notable that Trump was clearly underwater with this sizable group of swing voters who often decide elections in Maine.
Among self-identified independents, just 36% approved of Trump’s performance so far while 58% disapproved and 6% either didn’t know or were apparently somewhere in between. Most independents also weren’t big fans of Musk either, with 73% saying his role in the new administration was “inappropriate.”
Blurred lines
State Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, is refusing to take down a social media post in which she shared the photo of a Maine high school track athlete she says is transgender. Libby has criticized the Maine Principals Association for allowing the athlete to compete and win a girls’ event during Monday’s state championship track meet.
In one Libby post, the faces of the athletes who finished second were blurred to protect their identity, but not the face of the high school athlete the state lawmaker says is transgender.
While the issue of allowing transgender athletes whose biological sex assigned at birth was male to compete in girls’ or women’s sporting events is a contentious debate, Libby’s decision to post the photo of a high school student and potentially make them a target of abuse is getting the most attention.
House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, has described the post as using a kid to score political points.
“All kids deserve better than to be used as political fodder for internet bullies,” Fecteau said in a social media post. “Kids should be able to focus on being kids. They shouldn’t have to worry about a politician sharing images of them online without their consent.”
Libby told the Portland Press Herald she has no intention of removing the post. Meanwhile, the issue caught Trump’s attention. The president threatened to withhold federal funds designated for Maine if it continues allowing trans girls and women to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
“So we’re not going to give them any federal funding — none whatsoever — until they clean that up,” he said during a Republican Governors Association speech on Thursday.
Maine’s Political Pulse was written this week by State House bureau chief Steve Mistler and State House correspondent Kevin Miller, and produced by news editor Andrew Catalina. Read past editions or listen to the Political Pulse podcast at mainepublic.org/pulse.
