Posted on 06/28/2021 11:03:24 AM PDT by zeugma
Exactly backwards. Thomas is asking for consistent treatment of individuals and businesses. Refusing a writ is the judges saying “Tough beans.” Thomas wanted the case heard, which would require the judges to make a decision that would apply to all in a similar position. The current situation means the IRS can go after one grower, for political reasons (remember Tea Party) while looking the other way as other cases with the same facts.
“A prohibition on interstate use or cultivation of marijuana may no longer be necessary or proper to support the federal government’s piecemeal approach,” he wrote.
Thomas said the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2005 upholding federal laws making marijuana possession illegal may now be out of date.
“Federal policies of the past 16 years have greatly undermined its reasoning,” he said. “The federal government’s current approach is a half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana.”
Thirty-six states now allow medical marijuana, and 18 also allow recreational use. But federal tax law does not allow marijuana businesses to deduct their business expenses.
“What Thomas is saying is that Gonzalez v. Raich was wrongly decided”
No, that’s what he said at the time in his brilliant dissent; what he’s saying now is that the facts on which the Gonzalez majority’s argument was based no longer apply.
Even in Alabama, there are shops selling products laced with Delta8, but also $20 chocolate chip cookies laced with Delta9.
Tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars later, where do we stand on the "war on drugs?"
The way I’m reading this is that if the Federal government is not willing to enforce the marijuana laws that they wrote, and are currently denying federal law enforcement from enforcing, then they need to rescind all “roadblocks” placed in front of businesses/people selling/using marijuana. Right now it is a Hodge Podge of enforcement and non-enforcement which leaves the average citizen totally unable to comply with the law or to even know what the law is.
No he is saying that the confusion between State and Federal winking at laws is causing citizens engaged in legal State commerce to be Violating Fed laws that can either be winked at or ignored or used against that citizen. Let’s say that citizen pisses someone in Fed government off.
“Thomas and Alito carryon in the tradition of Scalia, while the other “Conservatives” defer to the federal executive and lower courts too often.”
Except when Scalia endorsed the New Deal Commerce Clause and even expanded it in Raich.
It took a Constitutional Amendment to ban booze. If we are Originalits, we should require nothing less for drugs. Absent such an Amendment, it’s up to the States.
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