Comment by mothballed

Comment by mothballed 14 hours ago

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> I can't think of any explicit Constitutional right where the courts have allowed application of a direct age limit to the right itself.

Right to keep and bear arms -- federally 21 to buy a handgun and 18 to buy a rifle/shotgun from an FFL. Although sometimes you can touch federal law (NFA) and not have such limit -- a 12 year old could buy a machine gun or grenade for instance privately and still be able to buy a federal tax stamp.

Speech - a little looser but the 1A rights of minors in schools are a little bit less than that of staff. It's been awhile since I looked over the cases but IIRC staff had slightly stronger free speech regarding political speech than students (I'll try to dig up the case later if someone asks for it).

irishcoffee 14 hours ago

There is a difference between what is said in the constitution and what has been declared as a federal law.

For example: meth is very illegal under federal law, and not mentioned in the constitution.

You should stop citing the constitution.

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  • mothballed 14 hours ago

    The controlled substance act, as applied, is insanely unconstitutional. That's part of the reason why they needed to pass an amendment to ban liquor.

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    • dragonwriter 14 hours ago

      > The controlled substance act, as applied, is insanely unconstitutional. That's part of the reason why they needed to pass an amendment to ban liquor.

      The Wartime Prohibition Act says you are wrong. The 18th Amendment was certainly necessary to both make the policy irrevocable without another amendment, and to give states independent power notwithstanding usual Constitutional limits on state power to enforce prohibition on top of federal power, it is much more dubious that it was necessary for federal prohibition.

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      • AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago

        The Wartime Prohibition Act was passed during the drawdown from World War I and the basis for upholding it was the wartime powers of Congress because of a scarcity of grain from the war.

        The last Congressionally declared war was World War II, so if that was supposed to be the constitutional basis for the Controlled Substances Act, there would seem to be the obvious problems that the war was generations ago and nobody is diverting scanty wheat from the food markets to make MDMA.

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      • mothballed 14 hours ago

        I just want to make clear, you completely ignored that I answered your questions and instead argued against someone else's tangent about meth (which although the government is unconstitutionally regulating as applied, isn't an explicit constitutional right which was what we were discussing) because they desperately needed to side rail the fact I was right by going on a red herring hunt (indeed, one where I was taken to task for apparently mentioning the constitution on a question that involves the constitution).

        The wartime prohibition act, to the extent it regulated intrastate trade -- was also beyond the powers restrained by the 10th amendment. The fact a wartime era court lol'ed their way into regulating intrastate commerce is just another example of the federal government happily steamrolling rights (something they are especially good at around wartimes), but they needed the amendment to keep it up in non-wartime.

        ----- Re: irishman due to throttling ------

        >Ignore meth. Do it again with wire fraud.

        The question was about age limits on things that there is an explicit constitutional right of. You don't have a right to meth nor wire fraud. Your argument here doesn't make sense, nor is there an age where meth or wire fraud are legal which again was the question.

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