Used his own logic? What the hell. Alito was doing his best to apply the Supreme Court’s reasoning from Lopez; the majority was doing its best to avoid having to do so.

As for the limits of the commerce clause, if you stick to a good faith application of the substantial effects test (and a modest judiciary), you might just squeeze Wickard in there (maybe), but Raich is just wrong.

They’re afraid the lab rats would escape their experiment by moving to Oregon and Washington. No matter how wonderful it clearly is, it can’t work if people can opt out (despite the fact that nobody would opt out if it was half as wonderful as they claim it is).

You clearly didn’t read the opinion in that case.

Which country has the more social-democratic policies? (Note: All of this divergence has occurred since the 1930s when Canadian courts went the opposite direction of American ones. The Canadian healthcare system started in a single province, and is still provincially administered.)

California, alone, is bigger than all of Canada. Why don’t American liberals try to build social democracy in the states they could win a majority in?

A Congressional finding doesn’t require much more than a committee meeting, a couple of witnesses expressing the opinion the ‘finding’ would ‘find’, and a vote. It isn’t much of an ‘empirical’ standard. Alito knows this. He’s just bringing up the idea that the Congress should actually back up its claims of jurisdiction with more than an “I say so”.

I think it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t believe that this technicality can be corrected, because the empirical evidence he asks for, in fact, doesn’t exist. That’s my impression anyway.

As I wrote earlier today, this turns out not to be true, unless I’m missing something. Here is the decision and Alito’s dissent, which includes this:

This would not preclude adequate regulation of the private possession of machine guns. Needless to say, the Commerce Clause does not prevent the states from regulating machine gun possession, as all of the jurisdictions within our circuit have done. [...] Moreover, the statute challenged here would satisfy the demands of the Commerce Clause if Congress simply added a jurisdictional element—a common feature of federal laws in this field and one that has not posed any noticeable problems for federal law enforcement. In addition, as I explain below, 18 U.S.C. section 922(o) might be sustainable in its current form if Congress made findings that the purely intrastate possession of machine guns has a substantial effect on interstate commerce or if Congress or the Executive assembled empirical evidence documenting such a link. If, as the government and the majority baldly insist, the purely intrastate possession of machine guns has such an effect, these steps are not too much to demand to protect our system of constitutional federalism.

I’ve learned not to take anyone’s word for what a decision says, because most people tend to pass on mistaken hearsay.

Which gives the game away.

I mean, it shouldn’t matter, on his view, whether we’re talking about knives or tanks—the principle should be the same. But by mentioning the particular facts in this way, as if they matter, he’s strongly suggesting that it isn’t principle, but the result that he’s after here. Ornstein isn’t interested in judicial restraint; he’s interested in “good policy”, by the lights of Ornstein.

Which turns the Constitution into nothing more than a political weapon to use against your opponents (because we know you won’t grant those same conservatives as much leeway when they want something you consider wrong and the text of the Constitution would forbid) instead of a set of neutral rules we all have to live with.

If the Consitution means what a liberal says it means, because he is morally right and others are morally wrong, why should nonliberals bother obeying it other than threats of physical force from the cops?