Posted on 07/06/2009 3:37:15 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
text of the Twenty-first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Section 1. : The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. : The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
Section 3. : This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
(Excerpt) Read more at caselaw.lp.findlaw.com ...
WikiPedia commentary: ...when Congress formally proposed the repeal of Prohibition on February 20, 1933, (with the requisite two-thirds having voted in favor in each house; 63 to 21 in the Senate and 289 to 121 in the House) they chose the other ratification method established by Article V, that being via state conventions. To date, the Twenty-first is the only amendment ratified by conventions held in the several states, rather than being ratified by the state legislatures.
The Twenty-first Amendment is also one of only two operative provisions of the Constitution which prohibit private conduct; the other is the Thirteenth Amendment. As Laurence Tribe points out: "there are two ways, and only two ways, in which an ordinary private citizen ... can violate the United States Constitution. One is to enslave someone, a suitably hellish act. The other is to bring a bottle of beer, wine, or bourbon into a State in violation of its beverage control laws—an act that might have been thought juvenile, and perhaps even lawless, but unconstitutional?"
FindLaw's commentary: Conceding, in State Board of Equalization v. Young's Market Co., that "prior to the Twenty-first Amendment it would obviously have been unconstitutional to have imposed any fee for . . . the privilege of importation . . . even if the State had exacted an equal fee for the privilege of transporting domestic beer from its place of manufacture to the [seller's] place of business," the Court proclaimed that this Amendment "abrogated the right to import free, so far as concerns intoxicating liquors." Inasmuch as the States were viewed as having acquired therefrom an unconditioned authority to prohibit totally the importation of intoxicating beverages, it logically followed that any discriminatory restriction falling short of total exclusion was equally valid, notwithstanding the absence of any connection between such restriction and public health, safety or morals. As to the contention that the unequal treatment of imported beer would contravene the equal protection clause, the Court succinctly observed that a "classification recognized by the Twenty-first Amendment cannot be deemed forbidden by the Fourteenth."
In Seagram & Sons v. Hostetter a case involving a state statute regulating the price of intoxicating liquors, the Court upheld the statute, asserting that the Twenty-first Amendment bestowed upon the States broad regulatory power over the liquor sales within their territories. It was also noted that States are not totally bound by traditional commerce clause limitations when they restrict the importation of toxicants destined for use, distribution, or consumption within their borders. In such a situation the Twenty- first Amendment demands wide latitude for regulation by the State. 10 The Court added that there was nothing in the Twenty-first Amendment or any other part of the Constitution that required state laws regulating the liquor business to be motivated exclusively by a desire to promote temperance.
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Gods |
Prohibition has been Repealed! :') |
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Prohibition, a precursor to the failed war on drugs.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
It's sort of interesting to me that the powers that be thought they needed a Constitutional Amendment to ban alcohol. Now some @$$hole at the FDA writes a regulation and it's a done deal.
ML/NJ
Prohibition: a precursor to the failed war on carbon dioxide.
The Left is filled with neo-puritanical nanny statists, ignorant underemployed do-gooders with too much time on their hands, and just plain idiots. Prohibition was the high watermark of the “social gospel” movement, they helped elect FDR, hoped he would reciprocate with patronage positions (God knows they were useless to private industry but had to make a living somehow), and he thoroughly screwed them over. Methodist women haven’t been a force in American culture since.
I lift a scotch rocks high in hope that history may repeat itself.
LOL. I used to have an employee, Juan Rios, who would go around singing that song (Happy Days Are Here Again) whenever he learned that the freeze on overtime work/pay had been lifted.
We need one of these, each, for the other two amendments passed around the same time, the 16th and 17th, and need to put the House back to one member per 30,000 people. The Progressive dunces in charge of government after 1908 really messed up the government that the Founders gave us and the same idealism that led them to pass the 18th is what caused the 16th (income taxes) and the 17th (Senate by popular vote) and to freeze the House at 435 members, so that now each representative has over 20 ties the constituents that they’d have had in 1900.
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