4 ms·
That's only half the picture. There's also the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not delegated to the feds belong to the states or the people. Federal drug
by wl 9y ago
That's only half the picture. There's also the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not delegated to the feds belong to the states or the people. Federal drug laws rely on the interstate commerce power, even though they also regulate conduct that is sometimes purely intrastate and/or purely non-commercial. The most natural reading of the Constitution is that the feds have no authority here. The Supreme Court disagreed in Wickard and Raich, but Wickard was poorly reasoned rationalization for political purposes and Raich does not stand except by relying on Wickard.
I mean, for all practical purposes, the feds will do what they want. But if you're going to cite the text of the Constitution, the feds are breaking the law here. It takes case law to justify what they're doing, not just the text.
Just a thought: Why did alcohol prohibition require a constitutional amendment but drug prohibition didn't?
- marcoperaza 9y agoI'm all for a faithful reading of the Constitution, and I agree that the federal government has overstepped the intended bounds, but it's ultimately irrelevant. For legal purposes, the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. If you want them to be more faithful to the original meaning, appoint judges who feel the same way.
- sbov 9y ago> Just a thought: Why did alcohol prohibition require a constitutional amendment but drug prohibition didn't? Prohibitionists wanted an amendment because at that point in time, no amendment had ever been overturned.
- marcoperaza 9y agoA properly-ratified amendment cannot be overturned, unless it decreases a state's share of the votes in the Senate without its consent. There are at least two reasons prohibitionists sought an amendment: 1) The Supreme Court at the time did not take the expansive view of the Commerce Clause that it has today, so it may very well have declared a federal prohibition law unconstitutional. 2) The amendment didn't give Congress the power to ban alcohol, it banned alcohol. That meant that legalizing alcohol required another amendment. This was a huge win for the prohibitionists.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> A properly-ratified amendment cannot be overturned GP probably meant “repealed” rather than “overturned”.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Just a thought: Why did alcohol prohibition require a constitutional amendment but drug prohibition didn't? It probably didn't; the Wartime Prohibition Act was passed before the 18th Amendment was ratified and generally viewed not to require the amendment; this was never tested because by the time it went into effect, the amendment had been ratified. The Amendment made prohibition a permanent policy as long as it wasn't repealed—which at that point was unprecedented—and was considered valuable for that reason.