>>Plus, I said explicitly that they found it a states' right violation, plainly meaning that the state right of rape victims to sue was being impinged.<<
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Such victims can take full advantage of STATE laws to sue the perp. A NATIONAL law to that effect exceeds the bounds of the Constitution. Of course, that wouldn't matter to you, though.
I am sorry you are so incensed, but I am not WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. I think your unjustified attacks may stem from your not having read the court's opinion, as I have. I read the Court's opinion as most significantly stating that the "state right of rape victims to sue was being impinged"--impinged means "encoached upon", according to my Funk & Wagnall's. Here is the part of the Court's opinion which will, I hope, prove to you, once and for all, that I accurately represented the Court's opinion:
Given these findings and petitioners' arguments, the concern that we expressed in Lopez that Congress might use the Commerce Clause to completely obliterate the Constitution's distinction between national and local authority seems well founded. See Lopez, supra, at 564. The reasoning that petitioners advance seeks to follow the but-for causal chain from the initial occurrence of violent crime (the suppression of which has always been the prime object of the States' police power) to every attenuated effect upon interstate commerce. If accepted, petitioners' reasoning would allow Congress to regulate any crime as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact of that crime has substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption. Indeed, if Congress may regulate gender-motivated violence, it would be able to regulate murder or any other type of violence since gender-motivated violence, as a subset of all violent crime, is certain to have lesser economic impacts than the larger class of which it is a part.
Petitioners' reasoning, moreover, will not limit Congress to regulating violence but may, as we suggested in Lopez, be applied equally as well to family law and other areas of traditional state regulation since the aggregate effect of marriage, divorce, and childrearing on the national econ-
omy is undoubtedly significant. Congress may have recognized this specter when it expressly precluded õ13981 from being used in the family law context.6 See 42 U.S.C. õ 13981(e)(4). Under our written Constitution, however, the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.7 See Lopez, supra, at 575?579 (Kennedy, J., concurring); Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 176?178.
We accordingly reject the argument that Congress may regulate noneconomic, violent criminal conduct based solely on that conduct's aggregate effect on interstate commerce. The Constitution requires a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local. Lopez, 514 U.S., at 568 (citing Jones & Laughlin Steel, 301 U.S., at 30). In recognizing this fact we preserve one of the few principles that has been consistent since the Clause was adopted. The regulation and punishment of intrastate violence that is not directed at the instrumentalities, channels, or goods involved in interstate commerce has always been the province of the States. See, e.g., Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 426, 428 (1821) (Marshall, C. J.) (stating that Congress has no general right to punish murder committed within any of the States, and that it is clear that congress cannot punish felonies generally). Indeed, we can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims....
As you can see, you have made a mistake. |
