I read Alito’s dissent.

His main objection is that the plaintiffs demanded a preliminary injunction with an extremely short deadline upon which they would consider a lack of ruling to be a “constructive denial” which they would appeal, which is highly irregular. He does not meaningfully address the reason for that irregular action, namely the government’s attempts to outrun the judicial process and deport people to El Salvador, from which it claims it cannot return them. Alito claims the courts should rely on the government’s statement that it would not deport the plaintiffs before their hearing.

Under normal circumstances, Alito would be correct. The government normally doesn’t try to do illegal things before the courts can stop them and it would be inappropriate for a plaintiff to apply the extreme time pressure seen here. These are not normal times and the rest of the court appears to recognize that.

Trump appointed three out of nine justices. Three more were appointed by Republicans (Bush 1 and Bush 2), so a 2/3 majority of justices are considered conservative.

Judicial conservatism, however does not always align with political conservatism. Judicial conservatism tends to mean staying close to the original meaning of the text of the law. Some of Trump’s actions require creative interpretations of the law; in the case at hand, Trump wants to use a law meant to expel citizens of an enemy country during a war to deport immigrants he accuses of being members of gangs without allowing them to challenge that action in court.

Thomas and Alito dissented, arguing that a creative interpretation of the law should be allowed here; neither is a Trump appointee.

The law operates on precise definitions.

Obviously the forced-reset trigger has pretty much the same effect as a machine gun and common sense suggests that the two should have the same legal status. They don’t though because 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b) defines a machine gun as:

Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger

and a firearm with a forced reset trigger does require a separate actuation of the trigger for each shot. It is the place of the congress, not the ATF to update the law.

Perhaps we should send powerful politicians who sexually abuse children there.

I’m not sure they think they do legitimately. They probably don’t care about that; they think they can try it and might get away with it for a while.