Quote (Plaguefear @ Sep 9 2023 02:29pm)
How is this different from the feds enforcing pot laws on states that legalised it?
Marijuana possession and use isn't a constitutionally guaranteed right, and federal drug laws were passed by congress and have supremacy over state laws insofar as they apply to interstate commerce, which was laid out in Gonzales v Raich in 2005;
Quote
Even respondents acknowledge the existence of an illicit market in marijuana; indeed, Raich has personally participated in that market, and Monson expresses a willingness to do so in the future. More concretely, one concern prompting inclusion of wheat grown for home consumption in the 1938 Act was that rising market prices could draw such wheat into the interstate market, resulting in lower market prices. Wickard, 317 U.S., at 128. The parallel concern making it appropriate to include marijuana grown for home consumption in the CSA is the likelihood that the high demand in the interstate market will draw such marijuana into that market. While the diversion of homegrown wheat tended to frustrate the federal interest in stabilizing prices by regulating the volume of commercial transactions in the interstate market, the diversion of homegrown marijuana tends to frustrate the federal interest in eliminating commercial transactions in the interstate market in their entirety. In both cases, the regulation is squarely within Congress' commerce power because production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity.
....
Unlike the power to regulate activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, the power to enact laws enabling effective regulation of interstate commerce can only be exercised in conjunction with congressional regulation of an interstate market, and it extends only to those measures necessary to make the interstate regulation effective. As Lopez itself states, and the Court affirms today, Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so "could … undercut" its regulation of interstate commerce. ... This is not a power that threatens to obliterate the line between "what is truly national and what is truly local."[12]
Notably, Justice Thomas pointed out in a case just two years ago that the constitutional argument for the interstate commerce clause to apply has been undercut by the very fact of the federal governments non-enforcement of marijuana criminalization, since that was the basis for the Gonzales decision, and thus it could be revisited and overturned in the future on that argument. Basically, if Gonzales argued that the federal government had an interest in controlling the market forces, and since then the federal government abdicated their role in controlling those market forces, than they can't use it as a basis to argue supremacy over interstate commerce and it should be left to the states.
But all of this is
completely removed from the issue of a constitutionally protected right like the right to bear arms