Lawmakers Advance Effort to Legalize Raw Milk

Virginia Free Citizen ^ | March 30, 2014 | Kate Miller

[30 Govt.]

I grew up on a dairy farm. the biggest concern with farmers selling raw milk to consumers is that farmers frequently treat cows with infections with antibiotics. The milk from these cows can potentially kill someone if they are allergic to antibiotics. Sometimes farmers screw up, treat the sick cow then forget to tell their fellow farm workers not to put the milk from the treated cow into the bulk tank with the rest of the milk. Also not to gross out anyone but sometimes accidents happen and a milking machine can fall off a cow into a pile of cow poop. Needless to say the bacteria that gets into the milk supply can be harmful to people in this situation. When a cow gives birth to a calf that milk in particular is super rich in nutrients and antibodies. That milk also has to be separated from the rest but I am not sure why other than it looks really yellow and thick, probably doesn't taste right. That said I grew up drinking raw milk and yes it does taste better. Store bought milk always tasted burnt to me. I never became sick from drinking raw milk. I think it can strengthen your immune system.

[Verginius Rufus]

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

[Amendment10]

If the buyers and sellers of raw milk are residents of different states, then Congress can make laws to regulate such milk. This is because the Founding States made the Constitution's Commerce Clause, Clause 3 of Section 8 of Article I to grant Congress the specific power to legislatively regulate interstate and foreign commerce.

H O W E V E R ...

If a milk farmer sells his milk only to residents of the same state that the farmer is a resident of then, regardless what FDR's activist justices wanted everybody to think about the scope of Congress's Commerce Clause powers, the states have never delegated to Congress the specific power to regulate such commerce.

In fact, when FDR's activist justices decided cases which tested the limits of Congress's powers in the 1930s and 40s, they wrongly ignored that Thomas Jefferson had officially clarified the limits of Congress's Commerce Clause powers. Using terms like "does not extend" and "exclusively," Jefferson had clearly indicated that Congress has no business sticking its big nose into intrastate commerce.

“For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively (emphases added) with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.” –Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank : 1791.

But who cares what Jefferson said about the Commerce Clause? After all, Constitution-ignoring RINOs and Democrats will argue that the Constitution means only what the Supreme Court says that it means.

That being said, the problem is that FDR's puppet justices had also wrongly ignored that the Supreme Court had previously not only reflected on Jeffersons words about the limits of Congress's Commerce Clause powers, but had also used agriculture, in the context of the 10th Amendment nonetheless, to clarify that the states have never granted to Congress, via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate agricultural production.

”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited. None to regulate agricultural production is given, and therefore legislation by Congress for that purpose is forbidden (emphasis added).” —United States v. Butler, 1936.

In fact, noting that I have yet to find references to any of the excerpts above in the Wickard v. Filburn opinion (corrections welcome), using terms like "some concept" and "implicit," here is what was left of the 10th Amendment after FDR's justices got finished with it.

“In discussion and decision, the point of reference, instead of being what was “necessary and proper” to the exercise by Congress of its granted power, was often some concept of sovereignty thought to be implicit (emphases added) in the status of statehood. Certain activities such as “production,” “manufacturing,” and “mining” were occasionally said to be within the province of state governments and beyond the power of Congress under the Commerce Clause.”—Wickard v. Filburn, 1942.

FDR's justices had reduced 10th Amendment-protected state sovereignty to a wives' tale imo.

So regardless of federal interference in intrastate commerce, including agriculture, since the time of Constitution-ignoring socialist FDR, the feds actually have no more power to make laws which regulate intrastate commerce, imo, than they have to regulate our 1st Amendment-protected freedoms.

Finally, the reason that the corrupt federal government is continually getting away with unconstitutional expanding its powers is because parents are not making sure that their children are being taught the federal government's constitutionally limited powers.