Thomas simply followed his principles here. Scalia didn’t. The four liberals on the majority side followed the basic liberal principal (the government can do whatever it pleases) over other liberal principles…

My post can be found at http://unrepentantindividual.com/2005/06/07/the-interstate-commerce-clause-a-reductio-ad-absurdum/ , if anyone is interested…

Enumerated _rights_ still get a smattering of respect, but nobody taken seriously in government has given even a passing thought to enumerated _powers_ since the New Deal.

Jason: All other things being equal, “lawmaking closer to the people who live under those laws” may indeed encourage smaller and less-intrusive government. There are credible arguments and a fair amount of evidence supporting this proposition. And to whatever extent it’s true, I would enthusiastically support moving lawmaking as close to the people as possible. But I (and, I suspect, our host) regard the smaller and less intrusive government as the primary good to be sought, and the federalism as merely a tool which can be useful to that end, and should be employed to the extent it’s useful and ignored in any context where it isn’t.

“Dogmatic” federalists, on the other hand, would be people for whom the principles of federalism were themselves primary, and who therefore believed that those principles should be applied without necessarily being concerned with their actual effect, in particular contexts, on the gestalt experience of government by citizens. Or, to put a more charitable spin on it, one could posit that they are those who simply assume in advance that devolving the maximum practicable amount of power on the smallest possible units will necessarily and in all cases have positive results.

I wrote a big post on my blog about the decision, so I won’t rehash comments I think we’d both agree to, but I wanted to engage you on your opening statement: I tend to be a pragmatic, rather than a dogmatic, federalist. What I mean by that is that I support federalism for the pragmatic reason that it tends to slow statism, rather than a dogmatic belief that federalism is somehow morally superior.

I’m not sure why they’re mutually exclusive. Couldn’t federalism’s pragmatic advantage of slowing statism be an acknowledgement that less statism is morally superior to more statism and that therefore anything that reduces or slows statism is morally superior to anything that increases or speeds statism? Federalism, applied faithfully and correctly, keeps lawmaking closer to the people who live under those laws than does centralization, and when coupled with a libertarian view of self-ownership and the inability of individuals to delegate powers they do not possess to a government, it makes it easier to keep people from infringing the rights of others – which is morally superior than the alternative.

So anyway, I’m no law professor and certainly no expert on federalism (though I’m trying – working my way through The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist as well as other writings of the time [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0940450429], and http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0739102869/ is next on the list), but it seems to me that being a pragmatic federalist and being a dogmatic federalist shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

As a gay blogger/blawger who must relentlessly endure hearing how mob rule the democratic process (as opposed to, um, the plain language of the Constitution) is the source of all governm…