U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Referee State Disputes Over Marijuana | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Referee State Disputes Over Marijuana

nbcnews.com

72 pointstnuc60 comments

> Nebraska and Oklahoma said Colorado's decriminalization has "increased the flow of marijuana over their borders," forcing them to expend greater "law enforcement, judicial system, and penal system resources," thereby harming the welfare of their residents.

And what about all of the resources you spend prosecuting people for recreation drug use? If you want to save money in that arena then Colorado and Washington have a great idea they can tell you about.

this is my main gripe with republican, as opposed to libertarian views. they believe in personal freedom and limited government... except where they don't.

The same with Democrats (personal freedom).

Different spins on Oligarchy/Corporatocracy. The Sanders wing of the Democratic party seems like the only one challenging.

It's all the same. I hate that people think there is this "left/right" gap when there isn't.

Sanders and Hillary both back Obamas official lines including increased wars, creating/arming ISIL/ISIS (yes, that was created by the US, directly. Don't kid yourself. In 30 years it will come out of a declassified document, just like Cointelpro, Bay of Pigs and the 1973 cope in Chile).

In regards to legalization, I don't think the US federal government will take a stance either way, unless Canada gets full legalization passed first. The biggest reason that it simply can't be legal at a federal level involves international treaties (which is why it's not even technically legal in The Netherlands, even though there are laws governing growing, sale and taxation .. even though it's still not legal to sell.. it's just 'tolerated' and taxed ...and regulated).

Bernie has been pretty clear that he believes the greatest threat to national security is global warming, not Isis.

I can't fault his analysis, there.

> Sanders and Hillary both back Obamas official lines including increased wars

The only remaining candidate to vote against war is Sanders. The only candidate to support legalization of MJ is Sanders.

While I agree there isn't a huge gap, I'm not sure "increased wars" is true in Sanders case. Sorry if I appear to be nitpicking, but at election time, unintended misinformation is everywhere.

Too true! What isn't everywhere is who is going to be the candidates' VP? Who are the other members of their cabinets going to be? These nominations are the only true powers a Prez has besides a veto(overridable) & political 'influence'(real or perceived).

Obama was ALL about transparency & change... until he chose Mr Patriot Act Biden & left Geitner & Gates right where they could continue the banker war on the economy and saving the military complex.

Conservatives believe in fiscal freedom and social control. Liberals, inversely, are for fiscal control and social freedom. Both, in theory, could argue they are for "smaller government".

Libertarianism wants both fiscal and social freedom. Small government compared to the "left" and "right", big government compared to the AnCap folks.

It is all perspective.

Ergo the saying "Libertarians are left of Left AND right of Right". It's so very true...

Stupid reductionist logic from a stupid libertarian business card.

thanks, everybody, for downvoting this.

Liberals aren't really for social freedom. They're for a different flavor of social control.

The idea that republicans profess to believe in personal freedom in all respects is something libertarians made up to malign Republicans. Republicans, like Democrats, believe that government should regulate the morals of the people when necessary. For Republicans, small government is a means to particular, mostly economic, ends, not an overarching ideological imperative as it is for libertarians. Thus, there is nothing internally inconsistent about Republicans preferring that government intrude minimally into private markets while also preferring a large and strong military apparatus.

The fiscal responsibility part of the Republican ideology is largely insincere. Sure, the people who vote Republican believe it, but the elected officials don't. During the Bush years, when the Republicans controlled congress and the presidency, federal spending grew enormously.

>Sure, the people who vote Republican believe it, but the elected officials don't.

... which is why the Republican Party is set to lose an election that should have been an easy lay-up.

>During the Bush years, when the Republicans controlled congress and the presidency, federal spending grew enormously.

That's how we ended up with the budget sequester, which is the only thing that seems to have actually worked since the Gingrich House in the mid '90s. Now that the sequester is gone federal spending will grow in leaps and bounds no matter who is in power. It's built into the system.

Intrude minimally into private markets? I don't believe the actions over the past years as pertain to women's access to healthcare and reproductive services is minimal. Republican governments across a myriad of states have been anything but minimal into their intrusion of private markets that don't align with their core beliefs.

If you believe that abortion is immoral, then it cannot be the subject of legitimate markets. We don't allow private businesses to discriminate against black people, use child labor, or buy and sell babies or organs, etc. Nobody sees those restrictions as being intrusion into private markets, because they don't consider those markets legitimate in the first place.

Which goes back to the original point: Republicans don't profess that personal freedom and free markets should apply in all circumstances. There are some things that are the proper subject of markets, and some things that are the proper domain of government. Things that are the proper domain of the government's right to regulate morality (e.g. pornography, abortion, drugs), are not within the proper domain of markets.

> If you believe that abortion is immoral...

Stronger: If you believe that abortion is murder. We don't deregulate the market for hit men just because we believe in the free market.

That's not stronger, that's narrower.

People want what they want, and don't usually have a consistent philosophical framework to back it up. They'll just use whatever phrase they've heard that speaks to them and aren't really concerned if they take the other side for another topic. They'll say that state's rights are important when they are arguing for one thing and forget about that principal when it comes to another, and it's not limited to one party or another.

Though there is the odiousness of "state's rights" originally being shorthand for "state's rights to allow slavery". It would be nice if people trumpeting the philosophy remembered that it was the justification for a monstrous institution and a war to maintain it.

People want what they want, and don't usually have a consistent philosophical framework to back it up

And people can be excused for that. A political organization should not.

Both major political parties in the USA are coalitions representing many groups of people with separate interests. It is in the interest of these groups to combine their resources when their goals tend to either align, or at least not conflict with each other.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and any coalition is going to have members who are there for different reasons. An individual person has a hard enough time putting together a coherent philosophy, and if a party is just a sum of its parts, it's easy to believe that the philosophy is going to be less coherent.

Which isn't an excuse for inconsistent or conflicting behavior. Working to restrict access to family planning under the banner of "pro-life" while cutting food and health benefits to poor children and their families under the banner of "cutting waste" is reprehensible.

That's what I like about Sharia Law, the consistency.

haha, you're on fire today

You're trying to talk about Republicans as having a single coherent philosophy, which is just not so. Same with the Democrats. Because of our voting system, there are only ever two viable parties, and so both parties have to be broad coalitions. The Republican party is a broad coalition of social and religious conservatives, libertarians, international realists, and neoconservatives.

Libertarian, Green, Reform, and other third parties are nice side shows, and good ways to get alternate ideas heard and stimulate conversation, but if you're serious about actually winning and exercising political power, you need to work inside one of the two big tents.

Logic and common sense will never override the primal urge that humans have to punish each other over actions that don't matter.

The "don't matter" is the key part. They might not matter to you, but they do to the people doing the punishing.

Their actions don't matter because there's no tangible benefit - even for themselves, it's just for the self satisfaction of control.

If not logic and common sense, what do civilized people use to overcome their urges?

Shame.

Sometimes I wonder about how the country evolves its view on things. And living through the evolution of gay marriage, and legalization of marijuana gives you some nice concrete data points. Watching the will of the people being expressed in these ways is kind of like watching a family dealing with a grumpy relative who slowly changes the way everyone else thinks about things. It isn't "fun" but it is fascinating.

I also know that in my parent's case it is their primary evidence that the country is going downhill fast even while I see it as a hopeful sign that the country can move forward. Not surprisingly, that dissonance is being tapped rather effectively at times by the political process. It is strange to see 'change' as the fuel that is used by others to either accelerate or stop further change.

If your parents are of the "liberals are ruining the country" flavor in particular, you can always point out that Colorado is quite purple.

"Progress occurs one obituary at a time".

Religious beliefs by age group: http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/compare/re...

Millennials have overtaken Baby Boomers: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/16/this-year-mi...

Shifting Marijuana Beliefs: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/14/6-facts-abou...

Changing attitudes on same sex marriage: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/07/29/graphics-slideshow-changi...

The decline of marriage (somewhat attributable to economic causes IMHO): http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/record-share-of-am...

Nebraska and Oklahoma continue to fund cartels south of the border when they could start funding their schools and help their budget shortfalls, not to mention contribute to personal freedom, just by ending prohibition.

Just another day in 'states rights' focused states that aren't adult enough to understand what that means. People voted this in en masse, does NE and OK hate freedom?

Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, DC are all asking the country when we are going to stop funding the black market and cartels.

States continuing to fight a losing and unneeded prohibition battle, will continue to send hundreds of millions and probably billions south to cartels that are quite rich while states budgets are poor. It is time that it ends across the board and quickly. What a waste of time and money prohibition has been.

The moralistic laws from last century making non-violent personal acts into crimes needs to end. It is too costly and the result is a black market with cartels awash in billions and billions.

It was a little bit of an odd case to begin with. The idea is kind of that there's a cause of action around state policy creating an inter-state "nuisance" in arguable violation of federal law, but there's no real precedent for that kind of thing in common law, and certainly not in statutory law.

If one were to establish such a cause of action, it would have major implications around things like differing environmental regulations, firearms laws, labor laws, tax policy, welfare, heck even fireworks sales.

I'm not surprised the SC didn't want to leap into that giant legal cluster headache.

This was a great decision. Such a monumental shift in drug policy should be enshrined in federal legislation, and not dictated by the courts.

I think that the Supreme Court is just tired of sorting out the Congress' (and state governments) mess caused by action or inaction.

My uneducated guess is that we will see a lot narrower decisions from the SCOTUS and probably some form of lesser engagement in the next couple of years.

It's literally not their job, if the Supreme Court got involved now... they'd have to tell the states they are not allowed to legalize pot, right?

That is exactly what they did in Gonzales v Raich - reasserted the legality and primacy of federal drug laws.

Wrongly, IMO, but that's the ruling.

The complaint is that that Colorado is acting in violation of federal law. If you feel that changes in drug policy should be pursued through federal legislation, then you should be in favor of the Supreme Court upholding existing federal law. Having said that, I agree with Colorado's assesment that the currect target of prosecution is the federal government for failing to enforce its laws (unless there is a specific provision compelling states to act in a certain way).

> If you feel that changes in drug policy should be pursued through federal legislation, then you should be in favor of the Supreme Court upholding existing federal law.

Personal possession of weed is already completely legal under federal law via the equal protection clause. Once they passed the law saying that it's legal in DC, that means that it's now legal everywhere, even if they haven't yet taken the time to strike the old language from the books.

The only time federal charges are still pursued is if there is a firearm involved.

Have a source for that? That one's novel to me.

Sorry for the lack of a more credible source, but for what it's worth:

http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2012/02/congress_oks_medical_ma...

Can this be used as the basis for motions to dismiss in any state court outside of DC?

In theory, yes. In practice so few people are getting charged with personal possession under federal laws that a challenge is unlikely to happen before marijuana gets rescheduled.

Thank you for the reply!

This is the view of one private attorney, and one that has not been tested in any court and is definitely a minority view. I would be highly skeptical of his opinion (and I am surprised this attorney was willing to attach his name to it publicly).

The author's argument is that medical marijuana related activities are no longer subject to federal law. This sounds a little dubious on its face, but maybe it is a compelling argument.

This doesn't argue that possession is legal everywhere. It specifically talks about Nebraska, one of the states in the lawsuit: ""In states where voters have not voted on it, for instance Nebraska, of course it's not going to be legal there," Pappas told us. "But patients and medical marijuana centers operating in full compliance with state laws -- through equal protection -- are not going to be subject to federal prohibition.""

This is essentially the current status quo. The author's argument would only apply in the case where a future president acted to enforce federal statues in states where medical marijuna is legal. Then this arguement could be tested in court.

This is the moral equivalent of people telling others they don't need to pay income tax because the fringes of the flag in courtrooms have yellow tassels.

There are zero precedents under the equal protection clause that do anything like what the link suggested. On top of that the equal protection clause by its terms doesn't even apply to the federal government, since it is situated in the fourteenth amendment. It has been reverse incorporated via the fifth amendment due process clause, but again never in any case remotely like what is being suggested. You can't just look at the words "equal protection" and start extrapolating wildly. That's not how these things work.

There are several memorandum from office of the Attorney General that state Justice Department policy as to where efforts should be focused (e.g. https://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/305201382913275685...) and even before that the federal government tended not to exert a lot of effort on small time marijuana users. But it is emphatically not the case that "personal possession ... is completely legal under federal law".

Please do not spread this type of misinformation, it can be have enormous consequences.

Fair enough. In practice though even if the theory doesn't hold up, you'd need to work pretty hard to get charged with possession by the feds. Even if you punched a federal judge while holding a bag of weed, they'd probably still toss the possession charge just to keep jury nullification types from trying to get seated.

>Personal possession of weed is already completely legal under federal law via the equal protection clause. Once they passed the law saying that it's legal in DC, that means that it's now legal everywhere, even if they haven't yet taken the time to strike the old language from the books.

Pot isn't legal in DC. It's still against federal law everywhere in the US.

Not that Congress actually has the power, under the constitution, to make possession illegal. But that boat sailed long ago.

Also FTA:

The Obama Justice Department urged the Supreme Court not to take the case. "Entertaining the type of dispute at issue here — essentially that one state's laws make it more likely that third parties will violate federal and state law in another state - would represent a substantial and unwarranted expansion of" of the Supreme Court's jurisdiction.

It wasn't a decision, per se. The court has simply refused to hear the case, which is what it does with most cases. They can always decide to hear a similar case later, or even change their minds about this one.

I wish they would have heard the case and explicitly found for Colorado. Under the plaintiff's logic, states would have a veto on anything their neighbors decided to do.

This is a technical thing. The court decided that Nebraska and Oklahoma can sue the Federal government for failure to enforce Federal law, but cannot sue another state.

And that's a good thing as it might get Congress to get off their asses and de-schedule cannabis.

No that's not it. The whole majority decision is one line long:

"The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied."

That's it. No four justices voted to take the case. That decision sets no precedent and they declined to provide any reasoning which could even be persuasive in terms of trying to predict how they will react to future leave-to-file motions.

We can speculate as to why they decided not to take it, but we can't know for sure because they didn't say.

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