Posted on 10/27/2020 10:34:24 AM PDT by grundle
In the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case Gonzales v. Raich, the court ruled that a person who grew and smoked their own medical marijuana was engaging in interstate commerce, even thought the marijuana never crossed state lines, and no money changed hands.
Voting for the majority were Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Scalia.
The dissenters were O’Connor, Rehnquist, and Thomas.
As a libertarian, I was very disappointed with this ruling.
I was also dumbfounded at the fact that every single liberal on the court voted against medical marijuana.
The ruling was based on a 1942 precedent Wickard v. Filburn, where the court ruled that a farmer who was growing his own wheat and feeding it to his own livestock was engaging in interstate commerce, even though the wheat never crossed state lines, and no money was exchanged.
The 1942 ruling said that the farmer was in violation of federal limits on how much wheat farmers could grow. These limits had been passed in 1938 as part of the New Deal, in order to raise the price of wheat at a time when millions of Americans were going hungry.
The 2005 ruling was used to justify a federal ban on marijuana.
I think it’s reprehensible that liberals tried to raise the price of wheat when millions of Americans were going hungry.
And I also think it’s reprehensible that liberals are against medical marijuana.
I hope that Amy Coney Barrett will help overturn these rulings.
Agreed. two of the worst interstate commerce cases ever.
You are outing yourself as a liberal?
That’s worse than being a blogger.
Just be thankful Gary Johnson is not running-attention whore.
A) I've yet to see a SCOTUS opinion in which I disagreed with Thomas, even when he disagreed with Scalia. This case is no exception. We don't need more Scalias or Alitos -- we need more Thomases.
B) I can't stand the fact that most of my fellow libertarians voted for Gary Johnson just because he won the Libertarian Party primary and because he was for the legalization of pot. Hello! There's a lot more to being libertarian than being pro-pot! Hello, McFly, Johnson was for a carbon tax. Not even big government Trump was for a carbon tax. We should all be embarrassed that the only person on the general ballot against a carbon tax was Trump. Can you imagine our lives today if a carbon tax had been put in place because either Hillary, Stein, or Johnson won the presidency?
They suck.
Wickard v. Filburn needs to have a challenge.
No “staray decisees”. Review all of them.
As Originalists.
I’ll be if they dug up Mason, Madison, Adams, et al, they’d freak out about what the Supremes would eventually find in their Constitution.
I’ve never met one liveral who was against medical marijuana. To the contrary, every liberal I know ranges from indifferent to full bore obsessed with Mary Jane.
Concise. And to the point.
Your words. You choose wisely.
A) You and I both. 100%. I love Scalia but Thomas is simply a better justice.
B) Yup. He’s basically a nut.
You can’t ban drugs without big government.
The government we have today is the child of the union of the progressives and religious temperance movement. The subversion of the constitution was possible only with this consensus.
I’m a conservatarian. You can look at that as a Libertarian except being for a strong global defense and against abortion, or a conservative without the bloated nanny state on most moral issues but staunchly anti-abortion.
Scalia, unfortunately, was for big government and vast bureaucratic power in total collusion with the left so that he could impose his religious dogma on the country, particularly with regard to the injunction against intoxicating substances. He was prepared to let the left get away with murder in areas like Wickard v Filburn so he could piggyback his religious nanny state on it.
Well FDR raised farm products to save farmers making it more expensive for desperate people to buy food (also limited crops) during the Depression.
I'm staunchly anti-abortion, but believe in federalism. In other words, throw Roe vs. Wade into the trash and let the states decide abortion (since the 10th amendment's enumeration clause forbids the federal government from doing anything not expressly stated in the constitution). So even though I hate abortion, I'd rather outlaw it at the state level than the federal level.
I'm also for strong defense, just not getting into a bunch of wars that don't involve us. If I had my way on Oct 2001 we would have been brutal against both Afghanistan and Pakistan (since they had at least as many tie-ins to Al Qaeda as Afghanistan), and their civilians would have been just as much fair games as ours were on Sep 11. How many would have to die? However many it took to make those nations surrender.
But then after the war we'd pull out of the area sans a few troops in a few of military bases there. Less deaths on both sides. Less restrictions of freedoms here at home (because the slay-the-infidel nations would have seen what happens when you attack us).
>I’ve never met one liveral who was against medical marijuana. To the contrary, every liberal I know ranges from indifferent to full bore obsessed with Mary Jane.
I can explain this discrepancy. The current bureaucracy descended from the early 20th Century union of progressives and the moral right, particularly the temperance movement. It was their collusion that created a sufficient majority to change and subvert the constitution and that remains the consensus today.
Your rank and file liberal has nothing against drugs, gambling, prostitution or abortion. But liberal officials maintain laws against the first three, and particularly drugs, to keep the big government moral right, like Scalia, in the coalition.
If drugs were legalized, the big government right would pull out and collapse the bureaucracy, and if the big government right pulled out to collapse progressivism, drugs would be legalized by default because the laws would be unconstitutional.
We went into Afghanistan and Iraq in order to crush Iran in the middle. Then Iran started insurgencies and Bush lost his nerve.
A blight on true American conservatism, of which limited government is a cornerstone.
Also hypocritical on its own terms, since it opposes government imposition of the moral Biblical value of charity.
Ever since Vietnam no president wants to be known as the Commander in Chief who presided over us either losing a war or being in one that lasted too long (and we should have won easily). Too many people still think of Vietnam as "Nixon's war" when he had nothing to do with getting us into it or making it last long -- he got us out of it the first year he was in office. Yet his name is the one associated with a war that many consider to be a stain on America's record.
Fast forward three decades and we were in a long war with Afghanistan, IMHO because Bush didn't go to war to win it (you know, the "win over hearts and minds" stuff and "we'll fight the war on terror the rest of our lives" stuff and "there won't be a treaty signing moment like on the USS Missouri" stuff). So what do you do if you're Bush? It becomes easy to start a new war in Iraq so everybody will forget the long drawn out war in Afghanistan. In Iraq he could make up a new objective that's attainable -- replace Saddam -- instead of the abstract unattainable goals of the Afghanistan war. So he could end his presidency as a winning president (we did get rid of Saddam).
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