[EagleUSA]

Touchy issue - but precendent usually trumps all. We shall see.

[Remember_Salamis]

So the author feels that Californai and Oregon are violating Federalist principles by asserting their constitutional rights???

Total crap.

[thoughtomator]

The Commerce Clause was originally intended to be extremely narrow, as a way of preventing trade wars among the States. Even the judicial tyrants who now wield it as a federal power trump card attest to this. As long as we continue to pretend that the courts can amend the Constitution at will, we will be a nation ruled by men and not by laws, and this whole debate is pointless. The United States is no longer a nation ruled by law. The only public contest is making the men who rule our men rather than their men.

[robertpaulsen]

"But punishing Oregon doctors would violate the principle of federalism because assisted suicide has been explicitly made a proper medical practice under Oregon law."

The federal government does NOT have a problem with Oregon's assisted suicide law -- that is a proper state function.

The federal government is simply saying not to use federally regulated drugs when assisting suicide.

[tahiti]

"Gonzales v. Raich, in which the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the federal government is entitled to enforce the CSA’s proscription of the use of marijuana"

"Proscription" means "to banish or outlaw."

In Griswold v. Connecticut, Justice Goldberg, in his consenting opinion, declared that ingesting a chemical, in this case a birth control pill, was a "fundamental" right, a right "retained by the people," protected by Amendment IX.

Alcohol, another chemical that free people can ingest, could only be banned by a constitutional amendment, not a federal law enforced by a congressional agency.

So, what has changed since then that allows the "powers of Congress," through the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), to overrule, usurp, diminish, "deny or disparage" our rights, "retained by the people," protected by the Constitution and affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1965?

[Sandy]

Does Oregon have the constitutional right to force the United States government to permit state doctors to assist patient suicides with federally controlled substances (narcotics)?

force to permit. The author doesn't notice how absurd that notion is.