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To: dennisw
Like I already posted -— Marijuana commerce runs cross national boundaries as well as the American states. It is reasonable for the Feds to regulate and ban it as well as methedrine, crack, etc

And I'll say again, you are supporting federal laws based on the New Deal Commerce Clause. Why pretend that you aren't?

If marijuana needs to be prohibited, then do the honorable thing and amend the Constitution, rather than spit on the original Commerce Clause and Tenth Amendment.

At lest 50% of Marijuana comes from Mexico as well as the hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. The Federal Govt definitely has a role here to keep out those poisons.

Correct. That's because of the enumerated power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. See the difference?

296 posted on 06/25/2011 10:03:52 AM PDT by Ken H
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To: Ken H

Let’s back up a bit. Before adoption of the Constitution, states, under the Articles of Confederation, had erected protectionist barriers that interfered with the free flow of trade in the new country. One of the main reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to remedy that problem. The framers’ solution was the commerce clause, which was intended to make a free-trade zone out of the United States. (The clause also delegated to Congress the power to “regulate” trade with foreign nations and the Indian tribes. We will hold until later the question of whether this was a good way to solve the problem.)

At first, the clause was closely interpreted as referring to interference by the states with the flow of commerce. In 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall’s Court, in the first big case involving the commerce clause, Gibbons v. Ogden, struck down a New York law creating a steamship monopoly for traffic between New York and New Jersey. Marshall laid down the principle that for the national government to have jurisdiction, the issue must involve interstate commerce; i.e., it must involve the trafficking of goods (not manufacture) between two or more states. He also recognized that the enumeration of the interstate commerce power implied powers unenumerated (concerning intrastate commerce) and thus undelegated.

Gibbons may have gotten things off to a good start, but it did not last. Marshall sprinkled just enough bad seeds that, taken out of context, would allow later justices, legal scholars, and political opportunists to cultivate the commerce clause into a general power to do anything that could conceivably affect interstate commerce.


297 posted on 06/25/2011 10:42:58 AM PDT by dennisw (NZT - "works better if you're already smart")
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To: Ken H

You should come out and state that the “Commerce Clause” has been misused by the Feds since 1824.


298 posted on 06/25/2011 10:44:49 AM PDT by dennisw (NZT - "works better if you're already smart")
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