[Art in Idaho]

Now, the legality of federal hate crimes rest not on the 14th Amendment but rather on the Commerce Clause. So it is now an attempt to give the federal government power to regulate local crime (while elevating certain types of victims to special status), which is a power not granted to the federal government under the Constitution.

I'm not an attorney, but knowing Obama and Holder, are they somehow connecting this to Obamacare?

[Meet the New Boss]

Not directly, but they are both part of a larger principle that has been at work over the last 80 years.

For many decades the Supreme Court pretended basically that the Commerce Clause did not limit the scope of what the federal government could do, at least in any meaningful way.

For those powerful interests who wish to convert the federal government into a central government with complete authority over the American people, the Commerce Clause became a handy catch-all with which to legally justify the power grab.

Want the power to order every American to buy health insurance? Use the Commerce Clause. Want the power to get involved in local crimes, where it might be politically useful in order to conduct federal show trials or to persecute politically-unfavored classes of persons? Use the Commerce Clause.

In recent years the Supreme Court has started to read meaningful limitations into the Commerce Clause, and it’s hard to see how the new version of the federal hate crimes law can be sustained as an exercise of the Commerce Clause.