> ...where does the government get the power to ban drugs.
It likes to pretend that the interstate commerce clause gives them that power. _ie_ they're "regulating commerce" by waging the drug war.
It likes to pretend that the interstate commerce clause gives them that power. _ie_ they're "regulating commerce" by waging the drug war.
But like the McDonalds Hot Coffee case, when you learn the facts about what actually happened, you realize the case was properly decided all along and those that say otherwise are just spreading ideologically based FUD.
Wickard is not about the crops Filburn grew for personal consumption.
It was about the extra crops he grew just cause. He didn't just grow a little bit extra. He grew hundreds of barrels of wheat extra, meaning several fields more than he was allowed. Filburn claims he was just going to use this excess wheat at home, despite having no means to consume such quantities. Clearly, unless he was actually going to let valuable quantities of crop go to waste, he was intending to sell them to someone.
And if Filburn got away with it, then everyone else would try to do the same. And in a year or two, the national wheat restrictions intended to stabilize the price of wheat would fail as prices collapsed from hoarded inventory entering the market. And wheat farmers would go bankrupt and pull out of growing wheat during a war. So of course SCOTUS ruled against him.
If Filburn hadn't completely blown past the wheat restrictions, there wouldn't be a SCOTUS case about him today.
Interestingly enough, he won at the trial level on different grounds (challenging the process by which the limit was set) but lost at the appellate level.
Notably, both Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia voted in the majority. Chief Justice Rehnquist was as apoplectic about that vote as Kennedy and Scalia were when Chief Justice Roberts sided with the majority to uphold the Obamacare individual mandate.
IMO, the liberal majority had the better argument on the individual mandate precisely because Scalia and Kennedy couldn't bring themselves to draw a line at homegrown cannabis. They were stuck relying on a ridiculous theory about affirmative obligations as they had already blew their chance at cabining the reach of interstate commerce, per se.