It just boggles the mind how perversely government logic looks here. So Alaskans say: we are OK with people using marijuana, we see no problem with it. And then the Feds come and say - well, we are still going to arrest and imprison you if you do it, despite the clear will of the people of Alaska, because we can. We know we don't actually change anything as we absolutely can not prevent people of Alaska from using marijuana, but we still will prosecute random people unlucky enough to be caught by us in Alaska while doing the thing completely legal and OK in Alaska, because that's what we do.
What's perverse about the logic here? Alaskans say: we're okay with people using marijuana. And the Feds say: that's great, but we're not okay with it and as long as it involves interstate transportation or the coastal waters of the United States, we'll arrest you for it.
That's precisely the separation of state and federal power the founders envisioned.
The perverse part is that people who are supposed to protect the rights of the Alaskans are instead actively working to deny them those rights, while hiding behind the flimsy excuse of "separation of state". It's definitely not what the founders envisioned - the "commerce clause" - the reason-to-go for every federal power expansion now - was meant to prevent trade bareers between states, not to allow the Feds to suppress state decisions under the guise of "oh, it might influence the price of marijuana in other states, so it's commerce, so we can do whatever we want". Calling this "precisely what the founders envisioned" is just laughable.
All it takes is you sending a picture postcard using the US Postal Service during your 'crime' to make it a federal thing.
This sort of hack to elevate crimes to federal level has been abused plenty of drugs cases in the past, so that separation of state and federal powers is mostly a matter of decorum, if the feds want to be involved in a case they will be.
The postal service being used within a state should not make a non-federal crime a federal crime. "Not crossing state lines" versus "using a service that could be used to cross state lines".
This cuts both ways.... do you really think, that, say, Mississippi, should be able to inact anything 51% of the voters vote for? It'd be back to the Jim Crow days.
We're talking not about "anything". We're talking about specific thing where the law enforcement enforces arbitrary prohibition against the will of the same people they pretend to protect. Comparing this to Jim Crow laws makes no sense - Jim Crow laws limited people's rights, legalization expands people's rights. Jim Crow laws was an arbitrary governmental restriction, legalization removes the arbitrary governmental restriction. If anything, you should be asking what if the Feds had Jim Crow laws and some state would say they would not support it anymore - is it good for Feds to try and force them to still abide by such laws?
Not that there is absolutely any evidence theres even 10% of voters in Mississippi - let alone 51% - that would really support instituting Jim Crow laws now. For starters, 37.5% of Mississippi population is African-American, and it would require 88% of white vote to achieve 51%. Are you seriously claiming 88% of Mississippi white population - I assume you don't go as far as assuming African-American citizens of Mississippi want to introduce Jim Crow laws - are not only fervently racist, but actually want Jim Crow laws? Any data to back that ridiculous assumption?
30 years spent living in the deep south. Maybe it wouldn't hit 51% but I guarantee you it would be a lot higher than 10%. You're also assuming equal voter turnout and no voter suppresion. These are both, shall we say, optimistic.
Of course, I'm pretty sure there are racists in the south - as well as everywhere else, this is a common mental malady, which, like lice, often manifests itself when proper hygiene is not maintained. However the claim that virtually all white population is so racist as to wish for return of Jim Crow laws feels a bit strong to me. As for voter turnout, it looks like specifically for Mississippi it's not that bad: http://www.governing.com/blogs/by-the-numbers/changes-in-vot...
and actually white voters' numbers are lower than black voters', while overall turnout is one of the highest in the nation - it looks like MS citizens take their voting seriously. Overall, 82% turnout doesn't sound bad at all, and if the hypothetical vote would be on something as outrageous as Jim Crow laws, I would think these numbers would further increase.
> Jim Crow laws limited people's rights, legalization expands people's rights. Jim Crow laws was an arbitrary governmental restriction, legalization removes the arbitrary governmental restriction.
As far as I know, those objections are irrelevant -- there is nothing saying "expanding people rights" or "removing governmental restrictions" are preferable compared to the opposite acts. As long as two acts of law both abide by US constitutional rules, they are equal in "goodness".
Well, maybe for you expanding rights and removing rights is the same thing. For me, it's not. Actually, I remember there was such thing as a Constitution where some guys wrote that people have the rights and government should be restricted in curtailing these rights, and they seemed to think that people's rights are preferable and government restrictions can be made only in specific limited areas. But what do they know? They're long dead anyway.
But let me ask you this: if for you it's the same, what problem you have with Jim Crow? After all, Jim Crow laws were approved by many courts and were considered very constitutional for a long time. So for you there was no problem with them? I know why I'd have problem with that - because they remove people's rights, and for only reason that they are of a "wrong" race. For me it's bad. But if for you there's no difference between people's right and government restrictions and one is not preferable to the other, what exactly is the problem there for you?
> I remember there was such thing as a Constitution where some guys wrote that people have the rights and government should be restricted in curtailing these rights, and they seemed to think that people's rights are preferable and government restrictions can be made only in specific limited areas.
I think you're jumbling up various documents there.
> After all, Jim Crow laws were approved by many courts and were considered very constitutional for a long time. So for you there was no problem with them?
From a legal standpoint, no, there was no problem (well, except for state-sponsored school segregation, which was ruled unconstitutional). From my (and likely yours) moral and cultural standpoint, they were terrible and this eventually resulted in the act that abolished them all. Both the act that instituted them and the act that abolished them were perfectly legitimate in their own way.
Morality and law are different things. The former can provide impetus for forging the latter, but confusing them is a Bad Thing and it's what leads you to Iran.
No, what leads you to Iran is the stance "if it's legal then it's OK". There are a lot of things that are legal but not OK, and when pointed to something that is not OK arguing "but it is legal!" is exactly the confusion in which you implicate me. My argument is exactly that - that what the Feds are doing is immoral and makes no sense. "But separation of powers!" is an Iran-like answer to this, if you like such comparisons - it's just saying "who cares about moral if we have the laws that we ourselves crafted that allow us to do what we want".
> what leads you to Iran is the stance "if it's legal then it's OK".
Nope. What I said is that, if it's legal then it's OK from a legal perspective, which is a tautology really and I can't believe I'm still explaining it to you.
> "But separation of powers!" is an Iran-like answer to this
To the contrary, the Iranian answer is to implicate moral into everything so that the law has to answer to "superior values", and to be honest I struggle to understand how you could fail to see this (unless you don't really know how Iran runs -- hint: religious/moral authority trumps regular law).
Separation of powers starts with the "two swords" of religious and temporal power being handled in different ways by different people, back when these topics were first seriously discussed in Europe (one could argue that the "unto Caesar" line is the start of this particular debate, but it was basically ignored for centuries afterwards). When people realized that this separation alone was not enough of a guarantee, they split it further (roughly along Montesquieu's lines) exactly so that nobody could inflict its own personal moral code on the whole of the community without the community agreeing first. When the community changes its stance (because of moral or technical changes or whatever), then it collectively agrees that laws should change, and new law supersedes old law. This is how the system should work in a democratic society (which is not to say that's actually what happens, but it's the ideal we strive for, so to speak).
Law shouldn't answer to anything but future law. The US Constitution lives about most other laws, but it's still "just" law.
That is how progress is achieved and how we can all live together without starting religious wars every other day.
I think the fact that this boggles your mind says a lot more about your inability to understand other people's point of view than it says about the policies of the federal government (or the government of Alaska for that matter).
