Who Can Really Say?

Those planning to get cancer in order to smoke legal pot ought to reconsider -- SCOTUS had decided Gonzales v. Raich, the medical marijuana case, and it appears the Court has come down cleanly on the side of illegal pot for sick people. At least that's the AP's take: Court: Sick Pot Smokers Can Be Prosecuted.

The four justices generally considered liberal (Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter) were joined by one of the two conservatives generally thought to be "swing" votes -- in this case Kennedy. But Scalia (not generally thought of as a swinger in any sense of the word) wrote his own concurring opinion and joined these five to make it a 6-3 vote. The other "swing" conservative, O'Connor, wrote a dissenting opinion joined by C.J. Rehnquist and partly by Thomas, who also wrote his own dissent. And they say baseball stats are confusing.

Kevin Drum reviewed the scorecard:

I now eagerly await cries from liberals claiming that Rehnquist and Thomas are right this time: the feds shouldn't have the right to regulate commerce if the states say otherwise. Conservatives will then chime in in support of Stevens & Company's broad view that the federal government is supreme as long as anything anywhere crosses state lines.

And thus the week begins....

The case is interesting not so much because of the subject (pot!) but because one of the smokers in the case was growing her own -- she wasn't getting her pot from a third-party source and so she argued that she couldn't possibly be engaged in interstate commerce (Congress enacted the law based upon their power to regulate interstate commerce). This ground has lay fallow for some 70 years, since Wickard v. Filburn, when the Court said that a farmer growing his own wheat for his own personal use still broke a federal law regulating how much wheat farmers could grow. The farmer lost last century and the grower lost this century too, on the basis, more or less, that government regulation can reach their purely in-state activity if doing so is necessary to an overall interstate regulatory scheme.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that argument, except for the fact that it has no boundary, which is, 'er, the point of a specified, enumerated power such as that to regulate interstate commerce, I'd think. And Drum's gently nudging point is well taken too, because in this case, the libs get to have their cake, but can't eat it, as the cons have already gobbled it down.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]