Talk:Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Diseases? What diseases?

However, consumption soon climbed as underworld entrepreneurs began producing "rotgut" alcohol which was full of dangerous diseases.

I don't think dangerous diseases is the correct phrase. "Caused many accidental poisonings" would be a better phrase. The fault of the home distillers was not one of contamination with bacteria or viruses or mold, as none of them could live in alcohol. The problem was bad distillation methods which lead to methanol being produced instead of ethanol, and methanol destroys your liver and your eyes first, so many people went blind and many people were poisoned and died from "bathtub gin" but none caught any dangerous diseases.

Why didn't it just say "Congress shall have the power to prohibit..."?

Is the reason known why the amendment specifically prohibited beverage alcohol, instead of merely giving congress the power to do so, as other amendments did? Was there a fear of lobbyism leading to a repeal of prohibition? -- 77.189.99.210 (talk) 22:04, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Prohibition had to be an amendment to the Constitution because at the time, before the Jones and Laughlin cases, the power of Congress to regulate commerce was much less than it is today. Prior to the mid-1930s, the US Supreme Court did not interpret the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to regulate anything but narrowly defined commerce as different from agriculture, and manufacturing. The Commerce Clause limits Congressional authority to regulating interstate commerce, and so if everything regarding the alcohol was confined in a single state (i.e. the hops for beer were grown in Colorado, transported (on state roads - no Interstate Highway at this time) to a Colorado brewery, the beer was brewed there in Colorado without employees from other states, and then the alcohol was distributed and consumed in Colorado, then Congress would not have had authority to regulate it. Note, however, that FDR had huge majorities in Congress and when SCOTUS started ruling New Deal programs unconstitutional, he threatened to pack the court in 1936. One of the justices changed his mind, flipping the previous 5-4 majorities the opposite way, and the Court stayed at 9 justices - but the interpretation of Congress's Commerce Clause power has been radically different ever since. See [National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation], which spelled an end to the more restrictive interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, though you'll find a boatload of other cases with other interpretations that effectively expand Congressional power under the clause.

There are today members of the Court who would like to return to the previous interpretation, and limit the federal government's power over interstate commerce. See Justice Thomas's dissent in [United States v. Lopez], where he talks of the "old" definition of commerce.DOH (talk) 03:03, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Connecticut

Did Connecticut ratify this or not? They are listed as one of two states to reject the amendment but also as the 46th state to ratify it. --Shawn K. Quinn (talk) 11:26, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

This is surprisingly hard to find a reliable source for. A lot sites say it didn't but I can't find anything that doesn't convince me it didn't get its information from Wikipedia.

On HeinOnline, I have a snippet of a law review article that, as far as I can tell, says it did not ratify. Alas, my Hein subscription does not allow me to see the full article to get all the context. Does anyone have access to the Connecticut Bar Journal? The quote, as much as I have:

...failure to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment as evidence of her rugged insistence upon the rights of the... controversial amendments came later. Connecticut, it is to be noted, did not ratify the Bill of Rights. This...

Annual Meeting of the State Bar Association of Connecticut [notes]; Connecticut Bar Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 3 (1933), pp. 91-160. 7 Conn. B.J. 91 (1933).

TJRC (talk) 00:20, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Aha! No, it did not:

"...it took until 1922 for the forty-sixth state, New Jersey, to ratify, and Connecticut and Rhode Island would never do so." Henry S. Cohn & Ethan Davis, Stopping the Wind that Blows and the Rivers that Run: Connecticut and Rhode Island Reject the Prohibition Amendment, 27. Quinnipac L. Rev. 327, 328 (2009).

I will revise the article. TJRC (talk) 00:25, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

I've now revised the article. I dropped www.usconstitution.net as a source; it seems to be just a web site run by an ordinary guy, nothing authoritative, and I think he just mistranscribed something. The claim that Connecticut ratified is contrary to the official Senate document that's used as a reference as well as the very thoroughly researched law review article I cite above (and also added as a source). TJRC (talk) 01:15, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

=This is incoherent

QUOTE: Woodrow Wilson: Which was the 28th President of the United States, he vetoed the 18th Amendment which was later ratified by congress and was called the Volstead Act. Which was enacted to carry out the Intent of the 18th Amendment.[2] President Wilson was the one that introduced the National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act. This act implemented the banning of alcoholic beverages as well as the production and the distribution of the beverages. This law was passed on July 22, 1919 with a vote of 287 to 100. Not too long after, the law was repealed with the passage of the 21st amendment to the Constitution. UNQUOTE Woodrow Wilson is a "who", not a "which". Presidents can't veto Constitutional Amendments. Then it says "President Wilson was the one that introduced the National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act." Um, are "introduce" and "veto" the same thing? They aren't. The Volstead act was introduced by Representative Andrew Volstead. I don't know how it was introduced in the Senate. Wilson didn't INTRODUCE the Volstead Act, but vetoed it (did NOT veto the 18th Amendment, couldn't), and got overridden. Whoever wrote this believes that the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act are the same thing. They are not. The 18th Amendment is what made it Constitutional for the houses of Congress to pass bills like the Volstead Act, which bills, if signed by the President or vetoed by the President but overridden, could not later be ruled un-Constitutional if such bills dealt on with the matters that the 18th Amendment lays out, because the 18th Amendment makes them specifically Constitutional. For instance the Supreme Court couldn't toss the Volstead Act on grounds of states' rights or inalienable personal liberty, since the 18th Amendment specifically empowers the Federal Government to trod on states' rights and individual liberty in these narrowly-confined matters. One thing that was required was legislation to define the Constitution's vague reference to "intoxicating", and that's done in the Volstead Act, not the Amendment. They are two different things. And whoever wrote this uses an informal style in which it is permissible to begin sentences with "which". Which is not the style for an encyclopedia.2604:2000:C682:2D00:146:7506:94D4:E2EB (talk) 23:33, 26 November 2017 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

This is not just incoherent, it's a mess.

To give just one example, take this sentence and footnote:

"Just after the Eighteenth Amendment's adoption, there was a significant reduction in alcohol consumption among the general public and particularly among low-income groups. There were less hospitalizations for alcoholism and less liver-related medical problems. However, consumption soon climbed as underworld entrepreneurs began producing "rotgut" alcohol which was full of dangerous diseases.[31]"

It is not possible for an educated adult to write that alcohol of any kind can be full of diseases, dangerous or otherwise. The sentence would make sense if the word 'diseases' was replaced by 'additives'. However, we cannot know if that was the writer's intent, or if it reflects information contained in the sourcing footnote.

One's next step might be to examine the footnote. Footnote 31 is a link to a history.com article:

http://www.history.com/topics/18th-and-21st-amendments

This article does not address the question of additives in 'rotgut' liquor. But something even more worriesome becomes apparent: There is considerable and literal overlap between this article and the wikipedia article. Which came first, one would like to know? Is the Wikipedia article cloning the history.com article, or is it a case of vice versa? Regardless, a footnote cannot be valid if it merely refers to identical text published elsewhere. In any case, the question of rotgut is not addressed.

This is but one example indicating that this article is in need of drastic editing by a competent historian. Busterbarker2008 (talk) 09:59, 15 December 2017 (UTC)