I’d like an answer to this. Why can’t Congress pass a law banning citizens from engaging in sexual intercourse by this line of reasoning? For example why can’t Congress look at prostitution and say once citizens get a taste for intercourse they will frequent prostitutes. Then on the basis of this case the Federal Government is justified in banning intercourse becuase they have a rational reason to believe it affects interstate commerce.
Why can’t the Federal Government take control of education from the States becuase schooling affects inter-state trade in buying educational materials?
Why can’t the Federal Government take over zoning regulations becuase zoning an area industrial or residential affects inter-state trade?
This ruling gives the Federal Government the power to take over any action that could concievibly affect inter-state or foriegn trade. That basically amounts to everything and anything you can think of. That is why this ruling differs from any of the cases Bricker cited becuase it gives the Federal Government carte blanche to regulate anything. That concept is a complete anathema to the ideals laid out in the constitution.
This decision tells us nothing about how they feel about marijuana users in general, only those with severe medical problems, to whom they are clearly utterly indifferent at best, at worst, as you say, hostile.
I suppose you will say their decision was probably entered into with heavy hearts, upholding the law even though it caused human suffering. I feel a little cynical on this point. Show me who would be harmed if medical marijuana users were allowed to continue use. You have to get very vague and what-iffey to show that anyone would be harmed, much less harmed in the same way the medical marijuana users are most assuredly going to be harmed in this instance.
I think the only logical and reasonable conclusion to draw is that they don’t give a flying fuck about the suffering of the terminally ill.
You seem to honestly believe that the judges’ legal analysis should be, “Let’s see who is harmed the least, and rule that way.”
NO!
That’s the job of the legislature. The job of the courts is to interpret what the law says: how does the written law apply to the facts of a particular case?
To draw from this ruling any conclusion about how the Justices felt about the terminally ill is to show a deeply flawed understanding about the role of the judiciary – and, to the extent your misconception is shared by others, to show why this country is so complacent as judge-made law grows in size and scope. You WANT judges to be a second legislature, it seems. Cut it out! Stop that!
I am not about to let judges off the hook for the moral compass of their decisions, just because you have some notion that procedural interests trump morality. It does not.
Not lumping you in with them, but I know a totally different subset of the population who did the same thing recently . . .
Those who wanted a different result made similar arguments in the Schiavo case, remember? Did you feel the same way there? **Bricker **is right. If we let judges decide cases based on which side they want to win, we might as well select a different way of deciding cases. Maybe a phone-in system like American Idol–or Cupid.
Agreed. I think the ruling is correct, even if I don’t agree with it. The issues here are purely political. The two following questions should be answered, by politics:
is medicinal marijuana something that should fall under federal law or state law?
should medicinal marijuana be banned because it cannot be distinguished from recreational marijuana?
I think the answers to these questions should be:
state law
no. Solve this by setting up a state controlled manufacturing plant and prohibit the sale of marijuana from any other source.
I agree that judges should only apply the law (and other legal precedents), not rewrite the law, but what to do when the highest court in the land makes a ruling that is clearly not grounded in constitutionality, but in rationalization?
I am still having a hard time with the Wickard decision, which seems to be the cornerstone of the current decision. It seems clear to me that the intent of the Constitution and the interpretation of Wickard are at odds. Clearly the founders of our nation were trying to limit the scope of federal powers, yet the interpretations used to justify the Wickard decision grants the power to regulate everything to the feds.
In response to some other queries, as I understand it, the feds could concievably just begin dictating laws to the states about any old thing. Education? The feds should run the schools, since the quality of education affects the pool of workers, and the quality of workers available directly impacts interstate commerce. Sex? The feds should tell us what is ok and not okay, since beds, sheets, condoms, birth control pills, illness and new births all involve interstate commerce.
I mean, using this logic, is there any area of our lives that the feds CANNOT regulate?
I would have argued against the Schiavo people on the basis of morality as well. But not very vigorously. In my opinion, there wasn’t a whole lot of Terry Schiavo left to argue about. The dispute was basically over the disposition of what was, for all practical purposes, a corpse. A corpse who had clearly expressed her wishes to several people not to be kept on life support, back when she’d been around to talk. It really wasn’t much of an argument if you look at it on the basis of logic and morality. I was kinda surprised when the law came down on the right side of it, from my POV.
According to Lopez, the feds cannot regulate your possession of a gun in a school zone. And according to Morrison, the feds can’t provide a federal civil remedy for the victims of gender-motivated violence.
No, that is a classic example of a question that should be answered by reference to the Constitution’s description of the scope of federal authority. The majority decision quite simply got it wrong – as Thomas correctly noted, the logic of the majority decision is inconsistent with any limits on federal power.
Process trumps ALL, because you and I don’t agree on a system of morality. If we did – no problem! But I assume you’re unwilling to be bound by my system of determining morality, and I’m pretty sure I don’t accept yours.
So we have to make rules, rules that we agree upon in advance, that permit us to live side by side without my version of morality clubbing you over the head, and without your version of moralirty clubbing me over the head.
If you permit judges to simply abandon those rules when they feel like it, citing their “moral compass,” then you are changing the way we govern ourselves in this country.
And you won’t like your solution when President Bush appoints the next two Supreme Court justices for life, and the next ten federal circuit judges for life, and then a the people decide thay they’ve had enough of the Republicans and put the Democrats back in charge. Because those judges can follow their own moral compass and find that an unborn child is a “person” deserving of 14th Amendment due process.
Implicit in your post is the notion that the SC is following process over morality, or in the case of this particular court, political convenience. I think the SC often dumps process over morality, which has worked both to the advantage of both the left and the right. Roe v. Wade has often been portrayed as an example of a court overstepping its bounds and making a bad decision in terms of process. Here’s another example. There are plenty of others.
Fact is, the side whose ox gets gored in any SC decision tends to cry “foul” while the side that wins tries to cover up their victory by saying they following the law and process and so forth, so that eventually people tend to disbelieve all such claims.
As I do.
Your notion that process saves us from judicial tyranny is an interesting one. WRT to your final question, WTF do you think the shoutin’ is about wrt judicial nominees. The Pubbies fully intend to shoehorn as many anti-abortion zealots onto the Supreme Court as they can. They doing everything they can do in Congress to bend process to get their victory, and I suspect they’ll eventually get it.
I would feel like a fool if I took the Supreme Court at their word wrt to their decisions after the Florida election decision of 2000. I judge them as what they are … a bunch of cheap partisan hacks doing whatever appeals to their partisan interests and their venal impulses.
I’m still waiting on an explanation of why this ruling is correct despite the fact that it broadens Federal Power to include basically every concievible government action. A situation that is directly at odds with the rest of the language of the constitution.
I don’t speak for Steve MB but no the Federal Government and Congress as a part of that should have no right to regulate non-commercial and non-interstate/foriegn activities. This ruling gives them the power to do so and the power to regulate anything possibly related to inter-state or foriegn trade. That means anything that is or potentially could be bought anywhere in the world, legally or illegally. I can’t think of very many activities that don’t fall under that.
How would you design the system so that decisions like that could not happen?
Intentionally or not, sometimes all judges get the wrong answer. But that does not prove that there are not right answers. And this presents a problem for those who design legal systems. At some point, error correction must stop. At some point the need for *an answer * trumps the need for the right answer.
But let me ask you this. How far does the moral force of law go. Am I morally obligated to follow a law just because its the law? Am I free to ignore any old law that I don’t like, or does it have to offend my highest moral principles? The system and its agents claim that the system is justified in enforcing judge’s decision because it applies a fair system. If, in an individual case, I think the system has been unfair, does that change my moral obligation to follow the law?
The point that **Bricker ** and others have already made answers your question. This is an uncontroversial application of Wickard. If you look at the opinion and the links in this thread, you will see that medical marijuana advocates were relying on two recent cases: *Lopez *and Morrison. In those cases, the Court, for the first time since around 1937, actually held that a federal laws exceeded the Commerce power. Before those cases, lawyers had pretty much given up on that kind of challenge.
The issue then was one of precedent. Specifically, did those two cases reflect a ratcheting-in of the Commerce Power, or should their holdings be more narrowly construed? And how could those cases be reconciled with cases like Wickard? While I am unimpressed with the Court’s job of explaining the interaction between the cases, I am not at all surprised by the result. And it does not reflect an extension of the law that existed before *Lopez *and Morrison.
