Sucka of the Week

The inaugural Sucka for this week is Paul D. Clement, Acting Solicitor General of the United States, who decided it would be a good idea to make an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Ashcroft v. Raich. For those who don't know, this is the case where some very ill woman in California was legally prescribed weed for her many ailments, and found it worked fairly well when other remedies didn't. In swooped General Ashcroft's crack DEA unit, who, after some sort of jurisdictional "stand-off" with local authorities, (this author envisions various gruff chest-thumpings from the cop film genre), made off with the poor lady's plants. Up went the case, and after the sick burners prevailed in the Court of Appeals, Clement brought the issue before the 9 justices. (Actually, it may be 8; Chief Justice Rehnquist is sick himself, and may or may not be smoking off a stash of the Fed's secret G-2000 blend, the stuff of High Times legend and awesome potency).

The law-trained may derive a crocodile smile from the arguments of Mr. Clement, in which he claimed, essentially, that because Raich smokes strictly high-grade ganj grown entirely within the Cali borders that she recieves as a gratuity, and this "intrastate" dope displaces some portion of the huge amount of weed that is traded in foreign or "interstate" commerce for money, and therefore Congress meant to comprehensively crack down on Raich and others similarly situated. Nevermind that "intrastate" and "interstate" are treated as mutually exclusive propositions for the purposes of Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

Putting that legalese aside, Clement takes this week's Sucka SpaceCake since he has determined that it is important to invest our government's legal resources in preventing sick, miserable people from smoking weed when their doctors and state legislature say it's cool.