Thursday, May 09, 2013

Gun control and nullification: The matter with Kansas

The Economist talks Gun control and nullification: The matter with Kansas "That’s right: it is now a crime for a federal officer to enforce federal law in Kansas. How can the trapezoidal midwestern state do this? Well, it can’t, and Attorney-General Eric Holder has the unenviable job of explaining why."

Keivn Drum thinks Kansas Gun Law Looks Like a Trojan Horse for a Commerce Clause Challenge. "Most of the commentary I've read assumes that this is basically a gun issue, a Second Amendment issue, and a nullification issue. But I don't think so. It sounds, rather, like a test case for the Commerce Clause, the same thing that was at issue in last year's Supreme Court Obamacare ruling. Basically, Kansas is saying that the federal government can't regulate something that's made, sold, and used entirely within the confines of Kansas, because that's not interstate commerce. However, the Supreme Court ruled otherwise long ago in the case of Wickard vs. Filburn, which you probably all got sick of reading about last year. In that case, the court ruled that Congress could regulate even the purely local production of wheat "if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'" So it sounds to me like Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Secretary of State Kris Kobach are hoping to make this a test case that will rein in the scope of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce."

Plausible but in an update he says there's several year history of challenging gun laws in this way.

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