and it was unanimous which is SERIES.
I've had visions of Durbin throwing darts at pics of his 'progressive' Justices since this came out Friday
The federal system rests on what might at first seem a counter-intuitive insight, that “freedom is enhanced by the creation of two governments, not one.” Alden v. Maine, 527 U. S. 706, 758 (1999). The Framers concluded that allocation of powers between the National Government and the States enhances freedom, first by protecting the integrity of the governments themselves, and second by protecting the people, from whom all governmental powers are derived.
. . .
Federalism is more than an exercise in setting the boundary between different institutions of government for their own integrity. “State sovereignty is not just an end in itself: ‘Rather, federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.’”
Both lefties and righties must have lots of dogs in this fight.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-1227.pdf
hope your thread does not get invaded by the birferz like mine did
does this mean i have standing now?
Ping - for probably the best thing to come out of the USSC in decades.
The spirit of the decision is true to the Founders, and a staggering blow to the wave of statism trying to engulf us.
Got STANDING????
U doo now!!
...the authority to enact laws necessary and proper for the regulation of interstate commerce is not limited to laws governing intrastate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce.
Justice Scalia, concurring in Raich
______________________________________
As Justice Thomas put it:
Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything; and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
J. Thomas, dissenting in Raich
Bookmarked!
IMO FedGov™ is all powerful now, the only way to stop it is to secede from it.
I've had visions of Durbin throwing darts at pics of his 'progressive' Justices since this came out Friday
This tells the criminal fascist syndicate occupying Washington that states and the citizens living there are not your slaves. This will infuriate obuma, the fascist bureaucracy and the criminal congress.
Time to remove the federal fascists from states. Start passing laws and increase the states’ defense budgets and training. Some of these federal pigs will need to be run back to Washington at the point of a bayonet.
It looks like it was unanimous with Ginsburg & Breyer writing a CONCURRING opinion.
Unanimous? Wow.
My view is that even the Judiciary is starting to fear Leviathan.
I don’t understand how the same court that just told us a couple weeks ago that the Fourth Amendment is written on toilet paper could come up with a decision which is to all appearances so right. I suspect some chicanery at work. Has anyone here read the entire decision?
INDIVIDUALs???
Right up there with Magna Carta!
The gold water institute needs to watch their words more carefully. No goverment provides any man with freedom, freedom is the gift of our creator not our Government.
Government at best protects that gift, and at worse destroys that gift along with the life to which it is intimately connected to.
OK, I just read it.
This is HUGE!!!
I first read NY v US about 1997 and realized then that it by itself was almost enough to turn the entire governmental structure on it’s head. It is probably the most important SC case in the last hundred years.
This case recognizes a couple things:
That the Tenth amendment still exists and is in effect
That ultimately, the law is about human beings. It may effect corporations, but natural men and women have a stake. For a while lately, there has been a direction of the Court to recognize corporate fictions like States and corporations and classes but not see so much individual humans. This is a clear reversal of that trend.
That incarceration under a federal statute that is invalid or otherwise defective amounts to what can be called “an injury in fact”. This is common law talking here, folks.
Wow. I’m gonna have to read it again and check the citations...
Hard cases make bad law, the saying goes. Well, a bizarre case that the Supreme Court decided unanimously today has set a good precedent for the enforcement of residual Tenth Amendment powers.
As I described in December when Cato filed a brief in Bond v. United States:
Carol Anne Bond learned that her best friend was having an affair with her husband, so she spread toxic chemicals on the woman’s car and mailbox. Postal inspectors discovered this plot after they caught Bond on film stealing from the woman’s mailbox. Rather than leave this caper to local law enforcement authorities to resolve, however, a federal prosecutor charged Bond with violating a statute that implements U.S. treaty obligations under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Bond pled guilty and was sentenced but now appeals her conviction on the ground that the statute at issue violates the Tenth Amendment – in that her offense was local in nature and not properly subject to federal prosecution. The Third Circuit declined to reach the constitutional question, holding that Bond did not have standing to raise a Tenth Amendment challenge and that, following Supreme Court precedent, a state actor must be a party to the suit in order to challenge the federal government for impinging on state sovereignty. Bond now seeks Supreme Court review on the ground that the statute, as applied to her, is beyond the federal government’s enumerated powers.
Our brief argued that a defendant clearly has standing to challenge the constitutionality of the statute under which she was convicted, but also that lower courts are wrong in assuming that both the president’s power to make treaties and Congress’s power to make laws executing those treaties are unconstrained by the Constitution. That is, many judges seem to erroneously think that treaties can give the federal government powers it doesn’t otherwise have under the Constitution.
The Court’s ruling today, in a tight opinion by Justice Kennedy, makes clear that individuals can indeed raise Tenth Amendment claims that the federal government has overstepped its enumerated powers. The Court took no position on the merits of Bond’s constitutional argument — relating to the expansion of federal criminal law via the Treaty Power into areas that should be handled at the state and local levels – but this non-decision is in itself a positive development because it signals that the underlying issue is in dispute.
The Third Circuit is now charged with determining in the first instance whether the law implementing the chemical weapons treaty is “necessary and proper for carrying into execution” the Treaty Power, including whether it’s overbroad if it snares people like Bond.
Even if Bond loses on the merits in the Third Circuit and/or the Supreme Court, however, her case has confirmed the idea that someone directly and particularly harmed by a federal law can challenge that law’s constitutionality. As Justice Ginsburg said in her concurrence,
a court has no “prudential” license todecline to consider whether the statute under which the defendant has been charged lacks constitutional application to her conduct. And that is so even where the constitutional provision that would render the conviction void is directed at protecting a party not before the Court. ….
In short, a law “beyond the power of Congress,” for any reason, is “no law at all.” Nigro v. United States, 276 U. S. 332, 341 (1928). The validity of Bond’s conviction depends upon whether the Constitution permits Congress to enact §229. Her claim that it does not must be considered and decided on the merits.
For more on the proper scope of the Treaty Power, I recommend Georgetown law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz’s “Executing the Treaty Power.”
Update:
Josh Blackman parses Justice Kennedy’s opinion and shows how it tracks the approach that Randy Barnett and Cato have been taking in our Obamacare briefs.
May this be the start of a long-awaited renaissance for the 10th Amendment.
Mrkd