Posted on 12/17/2004 9:12:14 AM PST by inquest
Ashcroft v. Raich, the Supreme Court's medical marijuana case, isn't really about medical marijuana. It's about power -- the power of Congress to exert control, and the power of the Constitution to rein Congress in.
The named plaintiff in this case is Angel McClary Raich, a California mother of two afflicted with an awful array of diseases, including tumors in her brain and uterus, asthma, severe weight loss, and endometriosis. To ease her symptoms, doctors put her on dozens of standard medications. When none of them helped, they prescribed marijuana. That did help -- so much so that Raich, who had been confined to a wheelchair, was again able to walk.
Raich's marijuana was supplied to her for free from two donors who grew it in California, using only California soil, water, and supplies. Under the state's Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which exempts the use of marijuana under a doctor's supervision from criminal sanction, all of this was perfectly legal.
But under the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the possession of marijuana for any reason is illegal. The question for the court is which law should prevail in this case: state or federal?
Normally that wouldn't be an issue. Under the Constitution, a valid exercise of federal power trumps any conflicting state law. But is the application of the federal drug law to Raich a valid exercise of federal power? Does Congress have the right to criminalize the possession of minuscule amounts of marijuana, not bought on the illicit drug market, and used as medicine?
Americans often forget that the federal government was never intended to have limitless authority. Unlike the states, which have a broad "police power" to regulate public health, safety, and welfare, the national government has only the powers granted to it by the Constitution. Where does the Constitution empower Congress to bar pain-wracked patients from using the marijuana their doctors say they need?
According to the Bush administration, it says it in the Commerce Clause, which authorizes Congress to "regulate commerce . . . among the several states." And it is true that those words have long been treated as a broad grant of power allowing Congress to control almost anything it chooses.
The Supreme Court's most expansive reading of the Commerce Clause came in Wickard v. Filburn, a unanimous 1942 decision about a farmer who grew more wheat on his farm than was allowed under federal law. Roscoe Filburn argued that his excess wheat was none of Washington's business, since it all remained on his farm -- some of it he ground into flour, for his family, some he fed to his livestock, and some he planted the following year. None of it entered interstate commerce, so what right did Congress have to penalize it?
But a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against Filburn. It held that his 239 excess bushels of wheat affected the national wheat market whether he sold it or not, since wheat he produced for his own use was wheat he didn't have to buy elsewhere. If other farmers did the same thing, demand for wheat -- and its price -- would fall. That ruling threw the door open to virtually unbridled congressional activism. After all, if wheat that never left the farm it grew on was tied to "interstate commerce" and therefore subject to federal control, what wasn't? Not surprisingly, the years since Wickard have seen a vast expansion of federal authority.
Still, the Supreme Court has never actually held that congressional power under the Commerce Clause is unlimited. Twice in the past 10 years, in fact, it has struck down laws that could not be justified as commerce-related even under Wickard's hyperloose standard. But if the government gets its way in this case, the court really will have remade the Commerce Clause into a license to regulate anything. For unlike Filburn -- who was, after all, engaged in the business of running a farm and selling grain -- Raich is engaged in no commercial or economic activity of any kind. She is not buying or selling a thing. The marijuana she uses is not displacing any other marijuana.
But that point seemed lost on the court during last week's oral argument. "It looks like Wickard to me," Justice Antonin Scalia said. "I always used to laugh at Wickard, but that's what Wickard says."
Well, if Wickard says that Congress can ban or penalize Angel Raich's marijuana -- noncommercial, medically necessary, locally grown, and legal under state law -- then it says Congress can reach absolutely any activity at all. When I was a law student in the 1980s, I didn't laugh at Wickard, I was appalled by it. If Ashcroft v. Raich is decided for the government, future law students will have an even more appalling case to study.
You're right. All that needs to be done in that case is to simply challenge the laws written under that usurped power in court as unconstitutional.
Oops. Wait. That was done, and the courts have found that the power was NOT usurped.
Now what?
That's your current pet theory. Got anything to support it?
Oops. Wait. They couldn't do that so the courts "found" the power someplace.
Such usurpation will continue until there is a police state (followed by a civil war) or a court will actually read the constitution.
Congress ... does possess the power to foster and protect interstate commerce, and to take all measures necessary or appropriate to that end, although intrastate transactions of interstate carriers may be thereby controlled."
Houston, East & West Texas Railway v. United States, 234 U.S. 342 (1914)
That was an excerpt of an earlier robertpaulsen comment, hence the italics.
Indeed they did.
James Madison to Joseph C. Cabell 13 Feb. 1829
Letters 4:14--15
For a like reason, I made no reference to the "power to regulate commerce among the several States." I always foresaw that difficulties might be started in relation to that power which could not be fully explained without recurring to views of it, which, however just, might give birth to specious though unsound objections. Being in the same terms with the power over foreign commerce, the same extent, if taken literally, would belong to it. Yet it is very certain that it grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.
So you would be in favor of all substances being legal as long as the personal responsibilty was added back in?
It was very specific -- even our Mr. Filburn was allowed to grow his own wheat for personal use. He merely had to pay a per-bushel penalty (which he refused to do).
Now, to say that the court ruled the way they did because we were at war is a bit of a stretch. I don't buy it.
The Shreveport case involved regulation of intrastate commerce indirectly because it was done by a registered carrier of interstate commerce. The decision states "by reason of their control of the carriers". What was being regulated was the carrier, as an instrument of interstate commerce. By robertpaulsen's logic, it was necessary and proper for Congress to declare each and every one of us an "instrument of interstate commerce" for the purpose of regulation under the Commerce Clause.
I wasnt saying I bought his application of it, just supplying a possible source of his logic.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate."
The Public Choice effect has seldom been stronger than it is in the War on Drugs. I can think of one other case where this much effort and this much stridency went into trying to sustain an irrational and unsustainable law: alcohol Prohibition. That one created a river of blood, too.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit Eternity Road:
http://www.eternityroad.info
Of course I do. But it's just a start. You got anything (besides your tired old opinion) to negate it?
"[T]he New Deal Court’s own constitutional justification for its radical expansion of the scope of federal power over commerce was that the congressional measures in question were valid exercises of the power granted by the Necessary and Proper Clause and were not direct exercises of the power to regulate commerce among the several states. That is, the Court did not simply and directly enlarge the scope of the Commerce Clause itself, as is often believed. Rather, it upheld various federal enactments as necessary and proper means to achieve the legitimate objective of regulating interstate commerce."
--Stephen Gardbaum, Rethinking Constitutional Federalism, 74 Tex. L. Rev. 795, 807-08 (1996)
Move to Florida the land of flowers, where this flowering herb will someday be legal to possess again. Our prison system here is so overcrowded that a good civil disobedience foray could really tax the system to the point of collapse.
Great movie.
What we really have is a failure to communicate our real agendas. All this "pot isn't medicine" nonsense is a smoke screen for authoritarianism.
And the warriors say the medicine thing is a smoke screen. Maybe it is, that's why I never argue that aspect of it.
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