The folks at Reason are…well, reasonable.  And quite rational, for mammals.  But they get just as bassackwards as anyone when their emotions are involved.  

Like, apparently, here.

Well of course Republicans and conservatives are fair-weather friends of the 10th Amendment. Why would they differ from the 99% of Americans who don’t respect it?  Everyone with a personal hangup turns tyrant under the slightest pressure.

Chapman prove this obviousity here:

…the Bush administration asserted its power to prevent Californians from using medical marijuana after the state allowed it.

(For the record: marijuana is not now and has never been illegal at the national level. It, like alcohol, was here before the U.S. itself…and it was used by Founding Fathers. Since it has never been Prohibited the federal laws against it are illegal, not poor lil’ Mary Jane.)

Does this establish my “libertarian” bona fides, Steve?

(But also for the record: the federal government doesn’t see things my way, and it has all the guns and power.)

Steve Chapman then goes spectacularly wrong.  Like, one-eighty-degrees wrong.  Frankly I can’t even figure out how he manages it.  He was definitely using emotional reasoning, to coin an oxymoron.

Bachmann has made a similar exception. Asked about same-sex marriage in New York, she said that “the states have the right to set the laws that they want to set.” Then she threw herself behind a constitutional amendment to repeal that right.

Precision, please, Steve.  Bachmann’s not seeking to repeal “the right to set the laws that they want to set”.  She’s seeking to constitutionally define marriage as between one man and one woman.

And in doing so, she and Perry show respect for the 10th.  No one bothers with amendments if they don’t care about federalism.  Too much bother.  They just speak the magic words “Commerce Clause” and ram their agenda through.   

This isn’t hard to follow.  How on Earth did such a smart guy add two and two and get “negative four”?  He’s got emotional skin in this game.  Obviously he doesn’t like the measure.  Maybe he feels if he doesn’t bad-mouth it he’ll seem intolerant.  Certainly he’s sure it will do more harm than good.

But guess what?  It doesn’t matter.  Constitutionally, that is.

Prohibition did lots more harm than good, and yet the Prohibitionists were great Americans.  Were they smart? Well…yes, actually, when compared to today’s bluenoses. Prohibitionists eventually realized they hadn’t taken the black market into account, unlike current governments that keep making that very mistake.

Anyway, they were great Americans because they believed in the 10th Amendment.  That’s why they enacted the 18th.  And because they weren’t total morons like today’s activists, they later enacted the 21st too.

Now compare them with F’nDR.  They wanted to ban alcohol, he demanded mandatory federal socialism.  Had he sought and gotten an authorizing amendment for this, S.S. and Medicaid and Medicare would all be legal. 

(They would still be stupid, and bankrupting us, but they would have been perfectly legal and I wouldn’t be calling for F’nDR’s verminous remains to be excavated, castigated, and cast forth from this land with the greatest of dishonors, as befits all Americans choosing tyranny over freedom.)

Steve, gay folks could seek an amendment banning heterosexual marriage and they would be respecting the 10th.  The Shaking Quakers Redux could seek to make sex itself a federal crime without offending states’ right.

That’s the whole idea.  The 10th reserves to the states everything not specifically authorized by the Constitution.  But the amendment process is how we change the specific authority.

Questions?