Amendment XVIII.
SECTION 1
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
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NO BOOZE!
18A is probably one of the most famous Amendments to the United States' Constitution and while there have been reams of articles about the goodness and/or badness of the effect of the legislation, very little is written about the justification of the reasons why this needed to be passed.
The provisions of the National Prohibition Act upon any simple reading of the text would have already been constitutional and been perfectly amenable to 1A, Section 8, Clause 3: "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes". There would have been likely some discussion that regulating commerce among the several states may or may not have included the total prohibition and/or banning of something across state lines but given that the Narcotics Act 1915 did exactly what 18A intended to do but for harder drugs, then this is somewhat moot.
Almost since the end of Washington's Tenure as President in 1797, United States politics has been a permanent spiteful bunfight. Prohibition was an cross partisan bunfight, which found traction when the Anti-Saloon League and the Temperance Movement which also coupled with the Women's Suffrage Movement, was fiercely active; and then carried out their campaign with the background of anti-German sentiment.
Religious fervour is a useful tool of the political classes in the United States because on a hideously consistent basis, political operatives have found that they can push church goers into all kinds of political positions relatively easily. Marry religious fervour with a dash of racism an voila, you now have a viable and vocal caucus who will voluntarily act as your foot soldiers. So then, armed with an active cross partisan caucus, shouldn't that be enough of a political tool to pass legislation?
Well yes, but that's not the point.
Yes, 18A is a political tool but it existed to make use of the badness of the Constitution itself.
Until this point, although portions of the mechanics of the main body the Constitution had been changed by Amendment, there had been no Amendments repealed. It is notoriously difficult to get an Amendment passed (to the point where something like the Equal Rights Amendment has been languishing in limbo for 101 years); so much so that the Temperance Movement thought that if they could get an Amendment passed that it would be permanent because to undo it would require something which had never been done before.
The unspoken truth about 18A is that... it worked. It worked amazingly well. Crime fell. Admissions to hospitals as a result of injury fell. Admissions to hospitals as a result of diseases including cirrhosis fell. "But organised crime went up, didn't it?" I might hear you ask if this wasn't the medium of text. No. It did not. What happened was that organised crime became more visible and famous/infamous but that was because of things like radio and cinema, which meant that people could now see and hear stories en masse. Of course radio and cinema is going to tell sensational stories on the airwaves and on screen because that sells tickets and advertising space. What radio and cinema did not report is that things like domestic violence fell during prohibition because that's boring.
I'm not going to comment on the goodness or badness of alcohol, or even whether or not the federal government should or should not legislate on the morality of vice goods, but the existence of 18A very much confirms that the Constitution both shapes society and attitudes as does society shape it; and that coercive legislation works.
SECTION 2
The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
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Oh der.
SECTION 3
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
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18A S3 is one of the few examples where the Amendment itself contains an expiry clause to render it null and void if in the event that it failed to be ratified. Now while this sounds like a good idea in theory, it is worth nothing that for 18A to even appear in the document it must have already been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States; so Section 3 was already an inoperative section before it even appeared in the Constitution.
Of itself that doesn't seem like much but it does confirm the view that unless a thing is explicitly stated within the text of the United States Constitution then it does not exist. There is no explicit right to vote. There is no explicit right to life. There is no explicit right to liberty. There is no explicit right to the pursuit of happiness. There is however, an explicit right to the instruments to be able to destroy those things at an instant. BANG.
Amendment XIX.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
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Just like 15A, the right to vote, still isn't explicitly granted in the positive sense here. Even after the passage of 19A, the right to vote was and still is denied to people for failure to pay a poll tax, or failure to have correct Voter ID, et cetera. Yet again, if legislation was properly designed, the right to vote would simply be granted but it isn't; therefore 19A and what follows, is still bad.
19A is bad legislation because it neither grants the right to vote as a positive right, nor grants equal rights to do other things on the basis of sex. 19A does one very specific thing and that very specific thing only.
19A also helps to prove the utterly glacial movement of the United States Constitution and why it is so incredibly terrible at actually being a living document. It took 131 years for women to be given the franchise in the United States; likewise the Equal Rights Amendment has been languishing in the waiting process for more than a century. What kind of rot is this? 19A by omission serves to prove that the citizens of the United States are not equal, and are not endowed by the nation state with the same inalienable rights.
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Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
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Oh der.
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