Among the three opinions issued Thursday by the Supreme Court was one that shut down an attempt to trademark the double entendre “Trump too small.” The high court was unanimous on the bottom line that the rejection didn’t violate the First Amendment.

But the justices fractured on the reasoning in a way that calls into question how the Republican-led court goes about deciding cases generally — including gun cases.

To get a sense of the underlying split in the trademark case, Vidal v. Elster, look at the breakdown here, which may help to explain why it took this long to decide the appeal argued back in November:

“On the bottom line, there is no dispute,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the opinion joined at various points by different justices, as shown above.

But beyond the bottom line, the justices were more divided.

In her concurrence, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “perhaps the biggest surprise (and disappointment) of today’s five-Justice majority opinion is its reliance on history and tradition as a dispositive test to resolve this case.” Joined by fellow Democratic appointees Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, she called out Thomas’ citation of the 2022 ruling in Bruen (also authored by Thomas) that further expanded gun rights under a supposedly historical approach.

“The majority attempts to reassure litigants and the lower courts that a ‘history-focused approac[h]’ here is sensible and workable” by citing Bruen, Sotomayor wrote. “To say that such reassurance is not comforting would be an understatement,” she went on, lamenting that “one need only read a handful of lower court decisions applying Bruen to appreciate the confusion this Court has caused.”

She cited an amicus brief that makes that point in the pending gun case of United States v. Rahimi, on the constitutionality of a law that bars gun possession for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law under Bruen, prompting the government to appeal to the justices.

We could learn as soon as Friday morning how the court attempts to settle that Second Amendment confusion in Rahimi, which forces the majority to confront the mess that it made in Bruen.

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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com