Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Reason.com’s Jacob Sullum points out that ignoring what the U.S. Constitution says and misinterpreting what it means is not exclusive to Democrats and their supporters:

The day before last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., a group of prominent conservatives gathered a few miles away at the Virginia estate of our first president. Their Mount Vernon Statement swears fealty to a "constitutional conservatism" that "applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal" and "honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life." If only they meant it. …

When Congress sought to stop people from drinking, it recognized that amending the Constitution was the only legitimate route. Nowadays it does not hesitate to suppress vice and compel virtue, at best throwing in a boilerplate reference to interstate commerce by way of justification.

Likewise, one searches the Constitution in vain for the power to create a national board of censors charged with regulating the content of TV shows. Yet Brent Bozell, the Mount Vernon Statement’s seventh signer and main organizer, is the founder of the Parents Television Council, an organization dedicated to manipulating this power, which would be unconstitutional even if the First Amendment did not exist. …

By enlisting the federal government in their moral crusades, conservatives do not merely alienate potential allies who reject their premises about the appropriate use of force. They sanction the idea that the federal government can do whatever the Constitution does not explicitly forbid, as opposed to the Framers’ vision of a federal government that can do only what the Constitution explicitly allows.

Justice Clarence Thomas highlighted this problem in his dissent from the 2005 Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal government’s authority to arrest patients who possess marijuana for their own medical use. “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause,” he wrote, “then it can regulate virtually anything — and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

The question is: If you don’t want government regulating your business (and you shouldn’t), why should government regulate your (or anyone’s) bedroom?