Colorado
Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, where it’s still classified as a controlled substance. This difference between state and federal laws can lead to challenges in knowing how and where the different laws apply.
What this could mean to you.
Federal jobs:
• Federal employees are not allowed to use marijuana. If you already have or hope to apply for a federal job, you may want to avoid marijuana use.
Student financial aid:
• You could lose federal financial aid opportunities for any marijuana use or possession charges. This is especially important for underage youth.
o Federal financial aid includes Perkins Loans, Pell Grants, Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, PLUS Loans and Work-Study programs.
o Section 484 subsection R of the Higher Education Act of 1998 states that a student with a past conviction of any controlled-substance offense (which still includes marijuana) isn’t eligible for any of the above federal financial aid.
Firearms:
• If you apply to purchase a firearm, you must complete federal Form 4473, which asks about unlawful marijuana use.
o Since marijuana is still illegal federally, marijuana users may be rejected from purchasing a firearm.
o Lying on this form is a federal felony with a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Housing:
• If you live in federally subsidized housing, any marijuana use or possession charges may mean that you lose your federal housing benefits.
Federal land:
• Marijuana is still illegal on federal land, including national parks, ski slopes and military bases.
Federally funded property:
• Places that receive a significant amount of federal funding must adhere to the federal Drug-Free Workplaces Act of 1988, which would ban the use of marijuana on those properties.
In American government, states’ rights are the rights and powers reserved by the state governments rather than the national government according to the U.S. Constitution.
From the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the Civil War in 1861 to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to today’s marijuana legalization movement, the question of the rights of the states to govern themselves has been the focus of the American political landscape for well over two centuries.
Key Takeaways: States’ Rights
• States’ rights refer to the political rights and powers granted to the states of the United States by the U.S. Constitution.
• Under the doctrine of states’ rights, the federal government is not allowed to interfere with the powers of the states reserved or implied to them by the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
• In issues such as slavery, civil rights, gun control, and marijuana legalization, conflicts between states’ rights and the powers of the federal government have been a part of civic debate for over two centuries.
Again, the doctrine of states’ rights holds that the federal government is barred from interfering with certain rights “reserved” to the individual states by the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The 10th Amendment
The debate over states’ rights started with the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
During the Constitutional Convention, the Federalists, led by John Adams, argued for a powerful federal government, while the Anti-federalists, led by Patrick Henry, opposed the Constitution unless it contained a set of amendments specifically listing and ensuring certain rights of the people and the states.
Fearing that the states would fail to ratify the Constitution without it, the Federalists agreed to include the Bill of Rights.
In establishing American government’s power-sharing system of federalism, the Bill of Rights’ 10th Amendment holds that all rights and powers not specifically reserved to Congress by Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution or to be shared concurrently by the federal and state governments are reserved by either the states or by the people.
In order to prevent the states from claiming too much power, the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) holds that all laws enacted by the state governments must comply with the Constitution, and that whenever a law enacted by a state conflicts with a federal law, the federal law must be applied.
The Alien and Sedition Acts
The issue of states’ rights versus the Supremacy Clause was first tested in 1798 when the Federalist-controlled Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Anti-federalists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed the Acts’ restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press violated the Constitution.
Together, they secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions supporting states’ rights and calling on the state legislatures to nullify federal laws they considered unconstitutional.
Madison, however, would later come to fear that such unchecked applications of states’ rights could weaken the union, and argued that in ratifying the Constitution, the states had yielded their sovereignty rights to the federal government.
The Issue of States’ Rights in the Civil War
While slavery and its abolition are the most visible, the question of states’ rights was the underlying cause of the Civil War.
Despite the overarching reach of the Supremacy Clause, proponents of states’ rights like Thomas Jefferson continued to believe the states should have the right to nullify federal acts within their boundaries.
In 1828 and again in 1832, Congress enacted protective trade tariffs, which while helping the industrial northern states, hurt the agricultural southern states.
Outraged by what it called the “Tariff of Abominations,” the South Carolina legislature, on November 24, 1832, enacted an Ordinance of Nullification declaring the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or citizens.”
On December 10, 1832, President Andrew Jackson responded by issuing a “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina,” demanding that the state observe the Supremacy Clause and threatening to send federal troops to enforce the tariffs.
After Congress passed a compromise bill reducing the tariffs in the southern states, the South Carolina legislature rescinded its Ordinance of Nullification on March 15, 1832.
While it made President Jackson a hero to nationalists, the so-called Nullification Crisis of 1832 reinforced the growing feeling among Southerners that they would continue to be vulnerable to the Northern majority as long as their states remained a part of the union.
Over the next three decades, the main battle over states’ rights shifted from economics to slavery.
Did the southern states, whose largely agricultural economy depended on slave labor, have the right to maintain the slave trade in defiance of federal laws abolishing it?
By 1860, that question, along with the election of anti-slavery President Abraham Lincoln, drove 11 southern states to secede from the union.
Though secession was not intended to create an independent nation, Lincoln viewed it as an act of treason conducted in violation of both the Supremacy Clause and federal law.
Civil Rights Movement
From the day in 1866, when the U.S. Congress passed America’s first civil rights law, public and legal opinions have been divided on whether the federal government overrides states’ rights in attempting to ban racial discrimination nationwide.
Indeed, key provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment dealing with racial equality were largely ignored in the South until the 1950s.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, southern politicians who supported the continuation of racial segregation and enforcement of state-level “Jim Crow” laws denounced anti-discrimination laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as federal interference with states’ rights.
Even after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, several southern states passed “Interposition Resolutions” contending that the states retained the right to nullify the federal laws.
Current States Rights Issues
As an inherent byproduct of federalism, questions of states’ rights will undoubtedly continue to be a part of American civic debate for years to come.
Two highly visible examples of current states’ rights issues include marijuana legalization and gun control.
Marijuana Legalization
While at least 10 states have enacted laws allowing their residents to possess, grow, and sell marijuana for recreational and medical use, the possession, production, and sale of marijuana continues to be a violation of federal drug laws.
Despite previously rolling back an Obama-era hands-off approach to prosecuting violations of federal marijuana laws in pot-legal states, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions clarified on March 8, 2018 that federal law enforcement officers would go after dealers and drug gangs, rather than casual users.
Gun Control
Both the federal and state governments have been enacting gun control laws for over 180 years. Due to an increase in incidents of gun violence and mass shootings, state gun control laws are now often more restrictive than federal laws.
In these cases, gun rights advocates often argue that the states have actually exceeded their rights by ignoring both the Second Amendment and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a District of Columbia law completely banning its citizens from possessing handguns violated the Second Amendment. Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that its Heller decision applied to all U.S. states and territories.
Other current states’ rights issues include same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and assisted suicide.
So when did it all change?
I contend that we lost control with the 16th Amendment. Once the feds had our money, they had the power to rule.
They now have the power to cut federal housing, education, farm subsidies, welfare, snap, student loans, the list goes on and on.
Money raised through income tax is used to pay for the programs, benefits, and services provided by the US government for the benefit of the people.
Essential services such as national defense, food safety inspections, and federal benefit programs including Social Security and Medicare could not exist without the money raised by the federal income tax.
While the federal income tax did not become permanent until 1913, taxes, in some form, have been a part of American history since our earliest days as a nation.
Evolution of Income Tax in America
While taxes paid by American colonists to Great Britain were one of the main reasons for the Declaration of Independence and ultimately the Revolutionary War, America’s Founding Fathers knew that our young country would need taxes for essential items such as roads and especially defense.
Providing the framework for taxation, they included procedures for the enactment of tax law legislation in the Constitution. Under Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, all bills dealing with revenue and taxation must originate in the House of Representatives. Otherwise, they follow the same legislative process as other bills.
Before the Constitution
Before final ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the federal government lacked the direct power to raise revenue.
Under the Articles of Confederation, money to pay the national debt was paid by the states in proportions to their wealth and at their discretion.
One of the goals of the Constitutional Convention was to ensure that the federal government had the power to levy taxes.
Even after the ratification of the Constitution, most federal government revenues were generated through tariffs — taxes on imported products — and excise taxes — taxes on the sale or use of specific products or transactions.
Excise taxes were considered “regressive” taxes because people with lower incomes had to pay a higher percentage of their income than did people with higher incomes.
The most recognized federal excise taxes still in existence today include those added to the sales of motor fuels, tobacco, and alcohol.
There are also excise taxes on activities, such as gambling, tanning or the use of highways by commercial trucks.
As true with the modern income tax, those early taxes were far from popular among the people.
But with the spirit of the American Revolution and independence still running high, some of the people took their dislike of taxes to far higher level.
Between 1786 and 1799, three organized rebellions—all protesting various taxes—challenged the authority of the state and federal governments to generate needed revenue.
Shays’ Rebellion from 1786 to 1787 was raised by a group of farmers in objection to what they considered the unfair methods used by state and local tax collectors.
The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 in western Pennsylvania came in protest to what President George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wrongly considered an innocuous excise tax “upon spirits distilled within the United States, and for appropriating the same.”
Finally, Fries’ Rebellion of 1799 was led by a group of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers opposed to a new federal government tax on houses, land, and slaves. While the farmers owned lots of land and houses, they were far from keen on paying taxes on slaves none of them owned.
During the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, the government realized that tariffs and excise taxes alone could not generate enough revenue to both run the government and conduct the war against the Confederacy.
In 1862, Congress established a limited income tax only on people who made more than $600 but abolished it in 1872 in favor of higher excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol.
Congress re-established an income tax in 1894, only to have the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional in 1895.
16th Amendment Forward
In 1913, with the costs of World War I looming, ratification of the 16th Amendment permanently established the income tax. The 16th Amendment states:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
The 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax the incomes of all individuals and the profits of all businesses.
The income tax enables the federal government to maintain the military, construct roads and bridges, enforce the laws and federal regulations, and carry out other duties and programs.
By 1918, government revenue generated from the income tax exceeded $1 billion for the first time and topped $5 billion by 1920.
The introduction of the mandatory withholding tax on employee wages in 1943 increased tax revenue to almost $45 billion by 1945.
In 2010, the IRS collected nearly $1.2 trillion through income tax on individuals and another $226 billion from corporations.
So there it is folks. We can all argue about states’ rights when it comes to gay marriage, marijuana, gun control, and any number of other issues.
However, as long as the federal government holds control of our tax dollars, there is really nothing we can do.
We either comply with what Washington says, or we risk losing federal funding.