Are There Any Constitutional Limits on Federal Powers?
A case to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in November gives the nine justices the first opportunity in many decades to rule on fundamental questions about the power of Congress to legislate, according to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law. In “Kids, Guns, and the Commerce Clause: Is the Court Ready for Constitutional Government?” (Policy Analysis no. 216), Reynolds shows thatUnited States v. Lopez raises the fundamental issue of whether the U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal government. In Lopez the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the 1990 GunFree School Zones Act, finding it beyond the power of Congress to enact. Such a finding is all but unheard of in the post-New Deal era. The act prohibited the possession of a gun within a specified distance of a school. At bottom, writes Reynolds, Lopez is not about gun control, or even about federal-state relations, but about whether the Court is ready to hold C
