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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2779 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 22, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Apparently some Amish people about 15 years ago were charged with hate crimes for cutting other Amish men's beards.

They tried to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute them, but the judge ruled that since the scissors used to cut the hair, and the vans used to drive to the men, had at some point crossed state lines, this was a valid prosecution under the interstate commerce clause.

I don't really have the time right now to make this into an effortpost for the main thread. But this is crazy. I'm living in crazytown. How we reached the point where such rulings aren't immediate grounds for revolution, I'll never know.

If you like that, then you will love Wickard v. Filburn, where the supreme court ruled that the federal government had a right to prevent a farmer from growing wheat in his own land for his own use because, if a bunch of farmers did that, it would substantially lower the price of wheat in the national market, thus affecting interstate commerce.

And of course, we have all heard about Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, so it's not a problem specific to the commerce clause; a court that can find the right to abortion and gay "marriage" in the fourteenth amendment is a court that can find anything in anything.

Roe wasn’t a 14th amendment ruling, it was a right to privacy under the ‘penumbra’ of the constitution. Famously Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it was badly written and not grounded in anything.

It missed its chance to be the one and only 10th Amendment precedent.

10th Amendment

The one that was supposed to be the most powerful of them all and ended up being the most useless. We've got the concept of "enumerated rights" instead, which is a diametrical opposite of what 10th amendment says. The Federalists were absolutely right - they warned us this will happen, and it happened. Though without the Bill of Rights it probably would be even worse.

The Federalists were absolutely right

The Federalists were against adding an explicit Bill of Rights, and only chose to do so as a compromise. The Anti-Federalists wanted to enumerate the rights, and I think have ultimately been proven right.

The Federalists were against adding an explicit Bill of Rights, and only chose to do so as a compromise.

Yes, but why they were against? Because they argued if you explicitly make a list "there's a right to X, right to Y, right to Z" - and then somebody comes with the question about whether or not the government can regulate R, then people would say "well, it's not X, Y or Z, and there's a list and it must be for a reason, those are clearly more important than others, so R not a real right, it's kinda secondary one, so let's regulate the heck out of it" - completely opposite of what 10th Amendment was intended. And they were right - we hear arguments like these all the time now. If it's not mentioned in the plain text of the Constitution, good luck limiting the government reach into it. The Anti-Federalists were kinda right too, in that that without Bill of Rights, we probably wouldn't be able to hold on even on those enumerated rights either - see Europe as an example. At least this way we got something out of it, even though much less than we were originally supposed to.

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