Pragmatism In Raich V. Gonzales

The question presented to the Supreme Court in Raich v. Gonzales is whether or not the Commerce Clause affords Congress the power to ban the growth, use, and sale of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act and whether it can enforce that act against ill people whose doctors prescribed to them medical marijuana as a remedy. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice John Paul Stevens employed Justice Breyer’s strand of pragmatism. The premise of that approach is that the Constitution enshrines values and principles, but it affords judges the flexibility to apply those principles to changing circumstances. Hence, one key aspect of pragmatic judging is its embrace of constitutional evolution, which we will see on display in Raich. Further, Breyer’s brand of pragmatism places great emphasis on using the Courts to facilitate, not impede, the work of other branches of government while protecting Constitutional values. While the definition I have provided of pragmatism to this point is vague, future …show more content…
As an originalist, Justice Thomas construes the Constitution’s text to have “the meaning understood [by the public] at the time of [its] enactment” (Bork 144). To do so, Thomas and other originalist judges look to documents from the Founding Era to discern which powers the public understood to be included in, for example, the power to “regulate Commerce…among the several States” (U.S. Constitution 6). As a corollary to the theorem that the one true meaning of a Constitutional provision is the one understood by the society that ratified it, originalists believe that stare decisis “is not, and never has been” “an ironclad rule” (Bork 155-6). In his Raich dissent, Thomas displays his originalist reasoning by seeking the Commerce Clause’s original understanding and by both ignoring and criticizing the Court’s precedential departure from that