The Trump administration, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford and representatives from 18 other states all supposedly agree that cannabis users are simply too dangerous to be trusted with their Second Amendment rights. 

All nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, on the other hand, vehemently reject such anti-drug poppycock. 

In a unanimous ruling last week, the high court slapped down a federal law that prohibited "unlawful users" of controlled substances from owning firearms in United States v. Hemani. The case stems from an instance where a Texas firearm owner, Ali Hemani, was charged under the federal law after admitting to authorities that he occasionally smoked marijuana. 

To be clear, nothing in the court's ruling allows "presently intoxicated" individuals from marauding around town with fully loaded firearms. Instead, it merely rejects the argument that the mere consumption of an illicit substance — such as marijuana — is enough to automatically bar an individual from owning a firearm for the rest of their life. 

"We do not question that sometimes an individual's unlawful use of marijuana (or any other controlled substance) may render him a danger to others," the court observed in its majority opinion. However, to argue that "anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous" was a bridge too far for every single justice on the bench.

The case will be of interest in states where recreational marijuana is legal and widely used by law-abiding citizens. 

However, it should also be of particular interest to Nevadans, because their attorney general and Democratic candidate for governor, Aaron Ford, had signed on to an amicus brief supporting the Trump administration's position to categorically strip marijuana users of certain rights. 

As I wrote before, that brief was an omnibus of Nixon-era prohibitionist propaganda and clichéd gun-control talking points — a hackneyed attempt to appeal to the knee-jerk anti-drug tendencies of conservatives while indulging the anti-gun preferences of progressives. 

Clearly, illiberal infringements on our constitutional rights are depressingly bipartisan. 

The court, however, was unimpressed with the government's flimsy legal reasoning outlined in such documents. Despite the ideologically divisive nature of gun rights, drug use and government's authority to regulate either, Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion made it clear that there wasn't any question about just how unacceptable the government's position was. 

"The government's [argument] fails on every metric it invites the Court to consider," Gorsuch wrote after a lengthy dissection of the legal analogies outlined in the case. The ruling even inspired Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan — hardly ideological besties on most legal matters — to write a separate concurring opinion in which they aggressively ridiculed the government for having rested its case on such shaky legal ground.  

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, who have been openly critical of the court's expansion of gun rights in recent years, wrote their own concurring opinion as well — in which they argued that even if the court had adopted a more restrictive view of the Second Amendment, the government's actions still would have fallen woefully short of legal muster. 

In other words, it wasn't even close. 

In the end, it was clear that the Trump administration and every one of the state attorneys general who signed an amicus brief in support of its position were radically divorced from anything even resembling a coherent legal argument. 

For the administration, last week's ruling is just one more embarrassing loss before a court that President Donald Trump, himself, helped shape over the years. 

For Ford, however, the ruling raises an important question about his legal judgment as an elected official who is supposed to protect the rights of Nevadans. Namely, why did he feel it appropriate to support the administration's effort to strip civil rights from a huge swath of Nevadans whose only "crime" is the use of a substance that is perfectly legal on the state level?

The answer to that question is almost certainly troubling for voters in a state with legalized recreational cannabis as well as relatively robust gun ownership rates. Either he considers the right to own firearms so unworthy of legal protection that he was willing to sign on to an ill-advised drug-war legal brief to dismantle it, or he truly believes marijuana users are so inherently dangerous they can't be trusted with the same rights as the rest of us.  

Lucky for us in Nevada (and elsewhere), the motivations of those who argued in favor of the government's actions in United States v. Hemani ultimately didn't matter to the high court. Whether it was anti-gun or anti-drug zealotry that encouraged attorneys general such as Ford to support the Trump administration's efforts isn't nearly as important as the simple fact that the law itself was plainly and unambiguously incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. 

As it turns out, even the rights of pot-smoking hippies are protected by our founding document — much to the chagrin of illiberal politicians on both sides of the political aisle.  

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas and founder of Schaus Creative LLC, an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.