The Prohibition Era in the United States, which lasted thru the greater part of the 1920s, was regarded by many as a colossal mistake, and probably rightfully so. But what I don’t understand is why they needed a whole constitutional amendment for it. Wouldn’t a federal statute be enough? Or even just a bunch of individual state statutes?
Back in the days when federalism was a concern, a federal statute would not have been enough. The Prohibitionists wanted it to be banned nationwide, and didn’t want to take chances with a stray state or two letting it stay legal.
Basically, they needed to amend the Constitution to give the federal government this power because in those days the federal government couldn’t get away with just pulling powers out of its emanations and penumbras.
It’s similar to FDR’s decision to move Thanksgiving back a week to extend the Christmas shopping season – that was before it occurred to people to just start putting up tinsil and greenery right after Columbus Day.
Hopefully, this has also taught us something about amending the Constitution. That it should be done rarely and then only to change an essential facet of how we run our country.
Then again, I’m not so sure this lesson has sunk in, considering some of the proposed amendments over the years.
Don’t mess with groups of women wielding axes. What they want, they get.
If I’m not mistaken, the federal government doesn’t have the authority to pass such a law. If you actually look at what powers are granted to the federal govt. in the Constitution, it’s only a few very specific things. You could do it if every state passed a law, but how would you get every state to do that?
Same way they got a nationwide drinking age of 21. Abuse of the ability to regulate interstate commerce by tying highway funds to the state passage of a specific law.
It was clearly an attempt to prevent the law from being annulled in court. Prohibition couldn’t be ruled to be in violation of the Constitution if it was in the Constitution. You see the same approach today in the proposed flag-burning amendment (which would be in violation of the First Amendment if it were an ordinary law), and elsewhere.
Yes, but in the legal climate of 1918, it would have taken the Supreme Court about ten seconds to declare such a law unconstitutional. The most Congress could have done in 1918 would have been to ban the transportation of alcohol across state lines, or to ban alcohol consumption in the District of Columbia and federal territories. It could not have banned the production and consumption of alcohol within a state. No one even suggested such a thing at the time; the Court had struck down federal labor laws, federal civil rights laws, and even federal anti-prostitution laws as infringements of state power.
Proponents of prohibition began working at the state and local level, and by 1918 approximately 19 states (sources differ on the exact number) had enacted statewide alcohol prohibition. Obviously, if you were pro-Prohibition, an amendment which (a) applied to all 48 states; (b) authorized federal as well as state enforcement; and © was very difficult to repeal was far superior to a patchwork of state and local laws.
Apparently they were unable to do that, according to Freddy the Pig’s post:
There were no federal highway funds in 1918, nor any government-to-government grants or revenue sharing of any kind. That particular coercive technique simply wasn’t available to the federal government.
RIGHT! At that time, they were honest enough to do it right: a constitutional amendment. The last gasp of adherence to the Bill of Rights.
I certainly prefer a system where we have more changes to the constitution than changes through tax coercion.
Out of curiousity, is a ruling by the FDA all it would take to ban alcohol nowadays?
If I understand correctly, yes - in theory. The current federal drug act (or whatever it is called), was created so they can ban classes of drugs. Used to be they had to go out and ban a specific drug if they didn’t like it; for example, if you wanted opium off the streets, you had to make a law aimed at opium, and if a new drug you never heard of hits the streets, lawmakers had to go back and create a law banning or restricting that. Now all they have to do is have a federal agency classify it under one of multiple pre-defined classes; unsafe for any use, usable only with a prescription, available over the counter, etc. Interestingly enough, I believe morphine (opium) & cocaine are classified as OK for medicinal use (with perscription & strict supervision, obviously), but marijuana is classified more strictly as a drug with no known medicinal use (by the US government - some states would disagree). However, I doubt it is possible at all for the FDA to do that (ban alcohol), the politics against an alcohol ban are so stacked against any would-be crusader that the new head of the FDA would change the classification as his/her first actions the head of the FDA, I assume.
… that last but wasn’t all that clear; I meant that any FDA change in classification of alcohol with an eye towards banning it would mean that you would have new people in the FDA that understand we don’t want alcohol banned, in pretty short order.