The Supreme Court somehow held that the feds can regulate what you do in your own home (in this case, growing marijuana for personal use) because it could have a butterfly effect on the interstate price. (Constitutionally, the feds can only regulate _interstate_ commerce.)
I think much more likely is that it will just be made legal federally sometime in the next decade. Marijuana legalization has majorities across ideologies (https://news.gallup.com/poll/514007/grassroots-support-legal...) and even though the inability to create federal law on something so popular seems like a good case study on how the US system doesn't always do a good job representing it's actual people, it seems to be at a critical mass where it can't be ignored for much longer. Even my parents' friends who are conservative have started doing weed.
I think the issue is this isn't seen by politicians as a motivating vote driver. It is, however, a motivation for someone to go out and vote against a politician.
That's ultimately what keeps things like MJ illegal. There are just far too many people that will get upset about it if it were made federally legal.
My state, Idaho, has one such politician that is constantly bringing up and trying to find ways to keep the wacky tabacy out of the state. Including trying to amend the state constitution for it. He does this because he's mormon and the mormons are scared of the devil's lettuce.
This gets at something I think a lot of people don't really understand. They see polls that show strong support for policy X, and then complain that politicians don't enact it. What they fail to consider is that while a strong majority may be in favor of the policy, it's not the top (or top 3) priority, and they will support candidates that have the opposite position on X, if they support their top priority.
This is situation where well thought out (and moderately constrained) referendum process can help achieve the majority desire for a policy that would not otherwise be considered important enough to drive the selection of representatives.
Yeah, that's essentially what happened here in Oregon.
And the 2nd chapter of it is after the ballot measure passed, the state liquor commission drug its heels for a couple years, because most of their executives are far more conservative than the median voter here (a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Eventually the state legislature got fed up with the obstructionism and passed a "ok, we're just doing it how CO did, stop stalling" bill.
And here we are. The sky didn't fall.
There's a lotta ways ballot measures can go into stupidity, but this is an instance where it helped force the bureaucracy to align with the majority voter position.
>(a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Because their industry is in bed with government so their priority #1 is coordinating with the people of that industry. The actual "value producing" activity of buying, distributing, selling liquor and managing those relationships is a sideshow.
> They see polls that show strong support for policy X
i would imagine those polls are full of selection bias - even if the poller is trying to be as neutral as possible. People who would agree to participate in polls tend to have strong(er) feelings than those who don't.
> referendum process
instead of referendums, there should be a representative vote by the elected politician, but with an option for the voter to submit their own vote (provided they pass a cursory examination that certifies they have read and understood the bill they're voting for).
E.g., a senator or an elected politician has N number of votes for a bill, where N is the number of people he/she represents. If those people don't want to participate in a bill voting process, the politician will vote on behalf of them (like they do now, supposedly).
However, an individual voter who wishes to, can certify their understanding of said bill, and rescind the representative vote for his electorate and vote himself directly on the bill. The politician will now have N-1 votes on that same bill.
This means for issues of importance, the individual can choose to participate. For issues that they don't care about, but have a vague sense of direction, they have their votes delegated to the politician that they elected once every X years.
Also it doesn’t matter if there’s majority support for a lot of things because most people don’t vote. If you want to get a policy enacted make sure you and your friends vote in elections regularly.
You should argue with him he's acting like Satan. The mormons (I used to be one) say that Satan wanted to force everyone to be good, Jesus wanted each person to have free will and choose.
I personally would be okay with having it legal if smoking could still be banned in multifamily complexes. I don't care if my neighbors are using edibles, but since I know that legalized weed means more smoke coming from my neighbors' balconies, I will always vote "No" when marijuana legalization is on the ballot in my location.
You've made about a dozen comments in this thread and they've escalated from "HOAs are unconstitutional" to "I'd rather shoot my fellow citizens than be drafted if weed isn't legal" to "driving high is fine, I've done it for decades." Each one a little more unhinged than the last, which is an accomplishment given where it started.
It reads less like a coherent political philosophy and more like someone who's been hitting the sacrament a little too hard this morning.
I smoke your "sacrament" daily, and cigarettes, and I'm terrified that people will think you're representative of either of those classes, or even a minority of them.
Most people in this thread broadly agree with you that marijuana should be legal. You're somehow picking fights with your own allies because they had the audacity to say they don't like the smell, or that driving impaired is bad. You're not defending freedom, you're being contrarian and hostile to anyone who doesn't arrive at your exact position with your exact intensity.
And the driving thing isn't a matter of opinion. "I've done it for decades and never caused an accident" is the exact argument every drunk driver makes right up until they do. Your anecdotal survival is not evidence of safety.
It's not about the smell. Secondhand marijuana smoke carries many of the same harmful compounds as cigarette smoke [1]. The issue is involuntary exposure in shared living spaces. And ballot measures are typically all-or-nothing: you can't vote yes on edibles but no on smoking in your apartment complex.
Until we start throwing cigar, pipe, and cigarette smokers in prison for smoking where I can smell it, I'm totally okay smelling some pot. The playing field needs to be leveled.
I don’t want my toddler exposed to secondhand pot smoke. Unfortunately it’s more common than secondhand cigarette smoke in my experience. I wouldn’t get upset on my own behalf but he’s too young to choose and it’s my responsibility to act in his behalf as much as I can.
Are you arguing that my toddler should be okay with it? The point is that it’s not about what I am okay with it’s about my being responsible for my son and what his adult self might want. We had opinions about the positive health effects of cigarettes in the 1940’s and 1950’s that turned out to be wrong. There’s a possibility you’re wrong about pot smoking too.
Government tobacco smoking bans in indoor spaces accessible to the public (or outdoor spaces near the entrances to such spaces) are not uncommon in the US, nor are private contractual (via leases for rental properties and sometimes CC&Rs that bind property owners) bans for non-public spaces.
Smoking (even of tobacco) can generally be banned in the CC&Rs of properties (multifamily complexes is the case where this makes the most sense) and by the landlord in any rented property, multifamily or subject to CC&Rs or not.
VOCs and carcinogens are a health hazard. Asthma, kids development, allergies, and occasional migraine trigger.
It’s not random we call it ‘dank’ or ‘skunk’ and if it’s good it should piss off your neighbours.
It’s 2026. Dry flower vapes get you higher, with less product, and sparing the lungs. They have a smell more in line with popcorn than a cigarette. They come in everything from one-hitter to portable-volcano. Fans exist too.
> Dry flower vapes get you higher, with less product, and sparing the lungs.
This may be subjective as I have tried just about every dry vape out there and each time the high is underwhelming. For me, the traditional bong hit is king.
Oh good grief. This is such an uninformed and unnecessarily belligerent take.
We can and do have public nuisance laws which kick in when an individual is impinging upon the health, safety, comfort etc. of other people. This exists in jurisdictions all over the world for all kinds of things, the penalties are usually minor and applied only to repeat offenders. It is completely reasonable for someone to support the idea of these applying to marijuana use, in fact, in most jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, they probably already do. Yes, repeatedly stink up your neighbor's apartment and you may get a warning followed by a fine, deal with it. Your parent is not a Nazi and is not throwing stoners in prison. Perhaps go touch grass instead of smoking it now and then.
You’re probably right, though I dread the possibility. I cannot stand the smell, and one of the best things about moving from California to Texas was avoiding that pervasive smell being everywhere. Negative externalities of personal behavior really need to be handled better in our society. If you want pot to be legal, fine, but only inside your own personal enclosed house.
It's been popular (with over 50% popular support) for the last decade though. The major opponents are the alcohol industry, big pharma and the prison industrial complex. Their lobbying efforts are too powerful. We (the people) don't stand a chance.
A farmer was told he could only grow X acres of feed on his own land; feed that he had no intention of selling and was being fed entirely to his own livestock on the same land.
This seems to overturn that in part, but until Wickard is overturned, and the interstate commerce clause reigned in, there will be weird side effects of it like this.
I looked at the actual decision [1] and didn't see Filburn mentioned once. I find that odd. Filburn [2] was a controversial and far-reaching decision that said that the Federal government's ability to regulate interstate commerce extended to people growing wheat on their own property for their own use. The rationale was that by growing wheat you weren't participating in the interstate wheat market. That seems like a wild interpretation to me but it's Supreme Court precedent at this point.
So I found this footnote:
> The government does not challenge the district court’s Commerce Clause
analysis on appeal. Accordingly, any such argument is forfeited, and we do not address it.
That's interesting. Here's a legal analysis that does bring up the Commerce Clause and Filburn [3]. I really wonder why the government didn't raise this issue.
I knew just from the headline this was going to be a 5th Circuit decision, and it was. This is the same circuit that is perfectly fine to override "state's rights" for other issues.
I suspect that if that ruling was made, then many other drugs being made at home for personal use might become legalized, at least unless states decide to go and ban it too. Note that I am not taking a position here on if that's desirable.
Yes, regardless of that specific case I'm hoping to see a series of Supreme Court decisions that will eviscerate federal government power over internal state affairs and restore the original intent of the 10th Amendment. Long live federalism.
The entire 10th amendment is basically being ignored because interstate commerce policies and rulings. For that matter, the 1st, 4th and 5th aren't being upheld either.
Gonzales v. Raich (2005) is a pretty straightforward application of the precedent of Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) [0] rather than a novel, out-of-the-blue new interpretation of the Constitution.
If they reversed Gonzales v. Raich they'd be under a lot of pressure to reverse Wickard v. Fulburn, which would have such wide ramifications I just don't see the court doing it no matter how warranted.
The problem is if you say the government can’t regulate MJ, then all drug regulations fall apart.
On one hand you should have a right to buy whatever you want at 21( which should be the minimum enlistment age), but I’d be concerned about Billy selling homemade GPLs or whatever.
The word "interstate" does not exist in the text of the Constitution.
There's arguably some merit to your position, but the argument that some case law is invalid because it doesn't meet the definition of a term defined in other case law is circular and incoherent.
Missed in the previous discussion: methanol is irrelevant. Grain based ferments have essentially zero methanol.(And methanol risk is a function of its concentration relative to ethanol — the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!) even fruit based fermentations with significantly higher pectin concentrations only produce trace methanol, and it’s not all that well concentrated in a distillation due to azeotropes (which also says that throwing out the heads doesn’t help that much).
Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.
> [Judge Edith Jones] also said that under the government’s logic, Congress could criminalize virtually any in-home activity
Well, yeah. This is essentially the holding in Wickard v. Filburn, which seems to be in tension with this decision (overturning that would be great but it’s not the role of the circuit courts of appeal to do preemptively)
For those wondering, the opinion[0] doesn't address the Commerce Clause power (and Wickard and Raich) becaue the government abandoned that argument. See footnote 5.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
Bought and rigged up a 'hand sanitizer plant' about five months into COVID. Populated the thing with thermocouples, load cells and automation with nodered on raspberry pi and a bunch of esp32s flashed with tasmota doing sensing and control. Everything talked over mqtt. Great little architecture and having it highly automated allowed me to focus on the parts that were less easily controlled for.
Decisions like this illustrate what a hollow farce the modern federal courts’ approach is to Constitutional governance.
To be clear, courts are not supposed to change policy or make new policy, they are just supposed to interpret the law as written.
So supposedly this ruling is “not a change in the law” but rather a discovery that actually the law has always been this way but oops, someone read it wrong 158 years ago and literally everyone has read it wrong for the ensuing 158 years.
Until now, when an unusually wise and discerning small group of people finally read things the right way.
I strongly support the substance of this decision, the ban was stupid overreach. But I also recognize that decades of agreeing with the substance of similarly silly “discoveries” has created a situation where federal judges have essentially infinite leeway to inject their own opinions into the law under cover of “wow, I finally discovered the correct interpretation” (no matter how tortured).
The best liquor I ever had was by a state police detective who had been home distilling since he was 12. It was made from rye and corn, but tasted like peaches.
I think it is kind of magical to witness the process. I only experimented a few times, and never aged it, so every was very sharp. The best was a sharp brandy made from a bottle of wine I bought. The worst was using a leftover keg of beer, which bittered the copper pipe, so everything after tasted like gin.
I would recommend people try it. You can make one out of copper pipe from a hardware store, a few fittings and a pressure cooker. Be safe, of course, and remember that ethanol is used as a preventative for methanol poisoning :)
If you have a stock pot, a steel bowl that is large enough to sit on top of the stock pot, and a Pyrex measuring glass, you can start distilling now.
Put the glass in the center of the pot. Fill the pot with not enough mash to float the glass. Top the pot with the bowl. The condensate will form on the bowl and run towards the bottom center of the bowl, where it will drip into the glass.
I was able to distill a few bottles of home made apple wine that I had screwed up some additional flavorings on. It took a couple of hours for 3 or 4 bottles.
You'll have to do your own research on the finer details of making this work. I figured it out from first principles in the middle of doing it, so it's not that hard. Hell, people have been distilling for centuries, before they even knew what caused fermentation. Anything pre-Industrial Revolution peasants could do, I should be able to figure out in my modern house full of power tools. I'm not here to teach you how to do this, just inform that it's possible with equipment you likely already have.
It's been way too long since I've taken a political science course, but does this mean that the ban is struck down for the entire country, or just the area that the 5th Court of Appeals covers?
As I understand it, this only applies to the three states in that district, all of which also have statewide bans against it.
My state (Missouri) has the most lax home distilling state laws in the nation, which allow residents to produce up to 500 bottles per year. Well, at least theoretically, since the federal ban takes precedence.
The US refused to defend the Commerce Clause, so the circuit court did not consider it, though the Commerce Clause precedent would have likely demanded a different result.
This is circuit split engineering by the administration, meant to allow the Supreme Court to overrule its precedent on the Commerce Clause or whatever.
The substantial issue is not "unconstitutional" or "revenue", but instead "corporate protectionism". The elephant in the room.
There are certainly concerns about home distillation. The question is whether We address those concerns uniformly or whether protections of "tax revenue" is really protection for corporate interests.
We live in a time of toxic corporatism. Not all corporations are toxic, but those who prioritize their interest over the common good are indeed toxic. Everyone has the right to use nicotine and smoke cigarettes. You can buy them - if old enough - anywhere. But the use of cigarettes is toxic. As are vapes. But some corporations believe that their wealth is worth all the early deaths and health costs that a lifetime of smoking brings.
It is the behavior of these corporations that is the issue here. Those who take the Friedman Doctrine to toxic extreme. The courts have promoted these greedoconomy by enacting United vs FEC and other anti-democratic policies. In contravention of their duty.
Corporate interest have become so powerful that we have become a corpocracy rather than a democracy.
Jeff Bezos has "Democracy dies in the dark" as the motto of the Washington Post. Democracy dies with the Friedman Doctrine and United vs FEC. Thanks Jeff and to all of the other corporate overlords.
TLDL: During prohibition, US government required adding 5% methanol to industrial alcohol, hoping that this would stop bootleggers from selling it as liquor. It was sold anyway, resulting in many deaths.
Great - but this will only until home distilling becomes popular in which case they will find a new reason to prohibit it. A company will produce a home-distilling gizmo with a fancy screen and app to go with it. They will raise some few $M's and have news articles written. Probably there will be a subscription consumable of some kind. Then there will be some bad press and they will make it illegal and the fancy home distiller will become useless do to a lack of software updates.
Homebrewing beer and wine was illegal at the federal level until 1978, and the sky didn't fall when that changed. Distilling is the same kind of personal-use activity — the main difference is that the law just never caught up. Good to see the courts pushing this forward.
It'll be interesting to see how many people get methanol poisoning from trying their hand at it without doing the research properly. That being said, so long as it's for private or non-profit use, I don't really see the harm here.
338 comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
The Supreme Court somehow held that the feds can regulate what you do in your own home (in this case, growing marijuana for personal use) because it could have a butterfly effect on the interstate price. (Constitutionally, the feds can only regulate _interstate_ commerce.)
That's ultimately what keeps things like MJ illegal. There are just far too many people that will get upset about it if it were made federally legal.
My state, Idaho, has one such politician that is constantly bringing up and trying to find ways to keep the wacky tabacy out of the state. Including trying to amend the state constitution for it. He does this because he's mormon and the mormons are scared of the devil's lettuce.
This is situation where well thought out (and moderately constrained) referendum process can help achieve the majority desire for a policy that would not otherwise be considered important enough to drive the selection of representatives.
And the 2nd chapter of it is after the ballot measure passed, the state liquor commission drug its heels for a couple years, because most of their executives are far more conservative than the median voter here (a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Eventually the state legislature got fed up with the obstructionism and passed a "ok, we're just doing it how CO did, stop stalling" bill.
And here we are. The sky didn't fall.
There's a lotta ways ballot measures can go into stupidity, but this is an instance where it helped force the bureaucracy to align with the majority voter position.
>(a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Because their industry is in bed with government so their priority #1 is coordinating with the people of that industry. The actual "value producing" activity of buying, distributing, selling liquor and managing those relationships is a sideshow.
You see this in every deeply regulated industry.
> They see polls that show strong support for policy X
i would imagine those polls are full of selection bias - even if the poller is trying to be as neutral as possible. People who would agree to participate in polls tend to have strong(er) feelings than those who don't.
> referendum process
instead of referendums, there should be a representative vote by the elected politician, but with an option for the voter to submit their own vote (provided they pass a cursory examination that certifies they have read and understood the bill they're voting for).
E.g., a senator or an elected politician has N number of votes for a bill, where N is the number of people he/she represents. If those people don't want to participate in a bill voting process, the politician will vote on behalf of them (like they do now, supposedly).
However, an individual voter who wishes to, can certify their understanding of said bill, and rescind the representative vote for his electorate and vote himself directly on the bill. The politician will now have N-1 votes on that same bill.
This means for issues of importance, the individual can choose to participate. For issues that they don't care about, but have a vague sense of direction, they have their votes delegated to the politician that they elected once every X years.
here's mine if you have a use for it. https://archiveofourown.org/works/65636176?view_full_work=tr...
HOAs, the lowest level of US government.
It reads less like a coherent political philosophy and more like someone who's been hitting the sacrament a little too hard this morning.
I smoke your "sacrament" daily, and cigarettes, and I'm terrified that people will think you're representative of either of those classes, or even a minority of them.
Most people in this thread broadly agree with you that marijuana should be legal. You're somehow picking fights with your own allies because they had the audacity to say they don't like the smell, or that driving impaired is bad. You're not defending freedom, you're being contrarian and hostile to anyone who doesn't arrive at your exact position with your exact intensity.
And the driving thing isn't a matter of opinion. "I've done it for decades and never caused an accident" is the exact argument every drunk driver makes right up until they do. Your anecdotal survival is not evidence of safety.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cannabis/health-effects/secondhand-smoke...
It’s not random we call it ‘dank’ or ‘skunk’ and if it’s good it should piss off your neighbours.
It’s 2026. Dry flower vapes get you higher, with less product, and sparing the lungs. They have a smell more in line with popcorn than a cigarette. They come in everything from one-hitter to portable-volcano. Fans exist too.
> VOCs and carcinogens are a health hazard. Asthma, kids development, allergies, and occasional migraine trigger.
This is the foundational reasoning for making perfume, air fresheners, deodorant, and scented cleaning supplies illegal to possess or use.
> Dry flower vapes get you higher, with less product, and sparing the lungs.
This may be subjective as I have tried just about every dry vape out there and each time the high is underwhelming. For me, the traditional bong hit is king.
> The right to waft my smells in any direction ends where your nose begins.
- Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin or Mark Twain or someone
We can and do have public nuisance laws which kick in when an individual is impinging upon the health, safety, comfort etc. of other people. This exists in jurisdictions all over the world for all kinds of things, the penalties are usually minor and applied only to repeat offenders. It is completely reasonable for someone to support the idea of these applying to marijuana use, in fact, in most jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, they probably already do. Yes, repeatedly stink up your neighbor's apartment and you may get a warning followed by a fine, deal with it. Your parent is not a Nazi and is not throwing stoners in prison. Perhaps go touch grass instead of smoking it now and then.
edit: Well, I should note the Utah vote was only for "medical" MJ.
A farmer was told he could only grow X acres of feed on his own land; feed that he had no intention of selling and was being fed entirely to his own livestock on the same land.
This seems to overturn that in part, but until Wickard is overturned, and the interstate commerce clause reigned in, there will be weird side effects of it like this.
So I found this footnote:
> The government does not challenge the district court’s Commerce Clause analysis on appeal. Accordingly, any such argument is forfeited, and we do not address it.
That's interesting. Here's a legal analysis that does bring up the Commerce Clause and Filburn [3]. I really wonder why the government didn't raise this issue.
I knew just from the headline this was going to be a 5th Circuit decision, and it was. This is the same circuit that is perfectly fine to override "state's rights" for other issues.
[1]:https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
[3]: https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/reviving-the-commerce-clause-one...
https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...
See the opening brief.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Links:
discusses some of the treaties:
https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/InternationalDrugControlTreaties...
History of illegalization of pot:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44782
On one hand you should have a right to buy whatever you want at 21( which should be the minimum enlistment age), but I’d be concerned about Billy selling homemade GPLs or whatever.
There's arguably some merit to your position, but the argument that some case law is invalid because it doesn't meet the definition of a term defined in other case law is circular and incoherent.
Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.
For those wondering, the opinion[0] doesn't address the Commerce Clause power (and Wickard and Raich) becaue the government abandoned that argument. See footnote 5.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
(I argued both cases.)
[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...
[1] https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...
Dashboard: https://imgur.com/a/so7iZJX
Sanitizer run: https://imgur.com/a/iWDlNfb
Quite a lot of fun actually.
To be clear, courts are not supposed to change policy or make new policy, they are just supposed to interpret the law as written.
So supposedly this ruling is “not a change in the law” but rather a discovery that actually the law has always been this way but oops, someone read it wrong 158 years ago and literally everyone has read it wrong for the ensuing 158 years.
Until now, when an unusually wise and discerning small group of people finally read things the right way.
I strongly support the substance of this decision, the ban was stupid overreach. But I also recognize that decades of agreeing with the substance of similarly silly “discoveries” has created a situation where federal judges have essentially infinite leeway to inject their own opinions into the law under cover of “wow, I finally discovered the correct interpretation” (no matter how tortured).
I think it is kind of magical to witness the process. I only experimented a few times, and never aged it, so every was very sharp. The best was a sharp brandy made from a bottle of wine I bought. The worst was using a leftover keg of beer, which bittered the copper pipe, so everything after tasted like gin.
I would recommend people try it. You can make one out of copper pipe from a hardware store, a few fittings and a pressure cooker. Be safe, of course, and remember that ethanol is used as a preventative for methanol poisoning :)
Put the glass in the center of the pot. Fill the pot with not enough mash to float the glass. Top the pot with the bowl. The condensate will form on the bowl and run towards the bottom center of the bowl, where it will drip into the glass.
I was able to distill a few bottles of home made apple wine that I had screwed up some additional flavorings on. It took a couple of hours for 3 or 4 bottles.
You'll have to do your own research on the finer details of making this work. I figured it out from first principles in the middle of doing it, so it's not that hard. Hell, people have been distilling for centuries, before they even knew what caused fermentation. Anything pre-Industrial Revolution peasants could do, I should be able to figure out in my modern house full of power tools. I'm not here to teach you how to do this, just inform that it's possible with equipment you likely already have.
My state (Missouri) has the most lax home distilling state laws in the nation, which allow residents to produce up to 500 bottles per year. Well, at least theoretically, since the federal ban takes precedence.
This is circuit split engineering by the administration, meant to allow the Supreme Court to overrule its precedent on the Commerce Clause or whatever.
There are certainly concerns about home distillation. The question is whether We address those concerns uniformly or whether protections of "tax revenue" is really protection for corporate interests.
We live in a time of toxic corporatism. Not all corporations are toxic, but those who prioritize their interest over the common good are indeed toxic. Everyone has the right to use nicotine and smoke cigarettes. You can buy them - if old enough - anywhere. But the use of cigarettes is toxic. As are vapes. But some corporations believe that their wealth is worth all the early deaths and health costs that a lifetime of smoking brings.
It is the behavior of these corporations that is the issue here. Those who take the Friedman Doctrine to toxic extreme. The courts have promoted these greedoconomy by enacting United vs FEC and other anti-democratic policies. In contravention of their duty.
Corporate interest have become so powerful that we have become a corpocracy rather than a democracy.
Jeff Bezos has "Democracy dies in the dark" as the motto of the Washington Post. Democracy dies with the Friedman Doctrine and United vs FEC. Thanks Jeff and to all of the other corporate overlords.
TLDL: During prohibition, US government required adding 5% methanol to industrial alcohol, hoping that this would stop bootleggers from selling it as liquor. It was sold anyway, resulting in many deaths.