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Two illogical things collided at the Supreme Court on Monday: the war on drugs and the court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. ...

Questions from several justices showed the absurdity of both the legal inquiry itself and its application to this case.

One of the more colorful offerings came from Justice Neil Gorsuch. Toward the beginning of Monday’s hearing in United States v. Hemani, the Trump appointee prompted laughter in the courtroom when he said, “The American Temperance Society back in the day said eight shots of whiskey a day only made you an occasional drunkard.” He told Trump DOJ lawyer Sarah Harris, “If you want to invoke the founding era, to be a habitual drunkard, you had to do double that, okay?”

Gorsuch recalled that John Adams “took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast every day” and that James Madison “reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day.” He added that Thomas Jefferson “said he wasn’t much a user of alcohol, he only had three or four glasses of wine a night, okay?”

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Gorsuch, who came to the high court from Colorado, wondered what the government’s stance would be if the defendant “took one gummy bear with a medical prescription in Colorado” to help him sleep every other day.

“Would that be enough under your theory, one gummy bear every other night with a medical prescription?” he asked.

Harris eventually conceded it would be.

Gorsuch further observed that the Trump administration has supported moving marijuana to a less-restricted drug control schedule, from its current placement on the most-restricted Schedule I to the intermediate Schedule III. He asked Harris, who had suggested that the justices could apply gun restrictions according to how strictly the government classifies drugs, why she wanted the court to consider the issue in Hemani’s case specifically.

“Why is this the test case?” he asked.

Harris said the drug was on Schedule I when the government brought the case and that it’s still on Schedule I, adding, “The government has not made final decisions with respect to what to do with marijuana.” (What she didn’t bring up is something the government stressed in its court papers, where it made several claims about Hemani’s allegedly nefarious connections to Iran, which gun rights advocates called irrelevant character assassination in their own brief to the justices ahead of the hearing.)