Today the Supreme Court did something that, on its face, has nothing to do with the Second Amendment — and everything to do with it. In Florida v. California (No. 22O162), the Court denied Florida leave to file its original-jurisdiction complaint against California and Washington over commercial driver’s licenses, 7-2, with Justices Thomas and Alito dissenting. On the same day, the Eighth Circuit handed down its decision in McCoy v. Jacobson, a Minnesota concealed-carry case. Nobody else in America has connected these two trucking cases. I’m going to.
What the Court Did in Florida v. California
Florida sued California and Washington directly in the Supreme Court — the Constitution gives the Court original jurisdiction over suits between states, so Florida didn’t have to start in a district court. Its claim: those two deep-blue states have been handing commercial driver’s licenses to foreigners who cannot read, write, or speak English — who cannot even read an English stop sign — and federal commercial-licensing law then effectively forces every other state to honor those CDLs on its own roads.
The trigger was a tragedy. On August 12, 2025, Harjinder Singh — an illegal alien who had crossed the southern border — attempted an illegal U-turn through an “official use only” median on Florida’s Turnpike, and three people in the minivan behind him died. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration later found Singh could identify only one of four highway signs; he had failed the English test at least ten times in Washington and once in California. Both states licensed him anyway.
The Court refused to even hear Florida’s case. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Alito, dissented:
“The State of Florida moved for leave to file a complaint against Washington and California for defying federal law by providing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens… I respectfully dissent from the Court’s denial of Florida’s motion because we cannot refuse to hear suits between the States.”
The upshot: seven justices effectively blessed a system in which a red state like Florida must accept CDLs that blue states issued to foreigners — people with no constitutional right to the license, and in some cases no legal right to be in the country at all.
The Eighth Circuit’s Mirror Image
Now hold that against McCoy v. Jacobson. David McCoy and Jeffrey Johnson are long-haul truckers who hold valid concealed-carry permits from Florida and Georgia. They drive through Minnesota, which refuses to recognize those permits and tells them to test, credential, and license all over again under Minnesota law before they may carry.
The Eighth Circuit rejected their Second Amendment claim. The court leaned on the plaintiffs’ concession that Minnesota’s permitting regime is constitutional as applied to Minnesota residents — so, the reasoning went, just go get a Minnesota permit. But that begs the question. Whether a Minnesotan must obtain a Minnesota permit tells you nothing about whether a non-resident merely passing through — a trucker who already holds a valid permit from his home state — must secure a standalone Minnesota license to exercise a textual constitutional right. The decision leaves Minnesota free to ignore out-of-state permits entirely — the reverse of what the Court just did for CDLs.
A Privilege Travels; A Right Stops at the Border
Put the two decisions side by side and the double standard is impossible to miss. I have no constitutional right to a commercial driver’s license — nor to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a veterinarian. Those are privileges with standards; fail the standards and you don’t get the credential. But I do have a fundamental, textual right to keep and bear arms: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
And yet our system forces Florida to honor a driving privilege that blue states extended to foreigners, while it lets Minnesota slam the door on a fundamental right exercised by American citizens. The privilege gets nationwide portability. The right gets stopped at the state line.
The Public-Safety Inversion
Anti-gun states always reach for “public safety” to justify rejecting out-of-state permits. But look at what that argument protects. An 80,000-pound tractor-trailer barreling down the interstate at eighty miles an hour, driven by someone who cannot read the road signs and can flee the country before trial, is far more dangerous than a law-abiding citizen carrying a handgun. If interstate safety justifies forced uniformity for trucks, it applies with far more force to a citizen exercising a constitutional right.
History runs the same way. Our tradition of firearms regulation has long been more lenient toward travelers, not less — precisely because someone passing through unfamiliar territory, who can’t tell the safe streets from the dangerous ones, is more at risk.
A Fortiori — and the Vehicle to Prove It
Here is the principle that ties it together: a fortiori — what is true for the greater is true for the lesser. If foreigners holding blue-state CDLs get to drive the highways of Florida, then an American citizen holding a valid carry permit certainly gets to carry when he travels into a blue state. To say a foreigner has a portable claim to a CDL but a citizen has no portable claim to his permit is not a fine distinction — it is two irreconcilable principles sitting inside the same legal system.
The way to harmonize them is for the Supreme Court to grant cert in one of these traveler cases and do for carry permits exactly what it just did for CDLs. McCoy v. Jacobson may be the vehicle. Whoever seeks cert next should lay all of this in front of the Court and say it plainly: you already decided this — in a trucking case.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.