"Putting a Stop to Congressional Overreach"

Reason Magazine has an interesting article supporting the Respondent in the upcoming United States v. Comstock case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The article also mentions the Cato Institute's amicus brief, which we previously blogged about and which is available here. From the article:

Later this term, the U.S. Supreme Court will have a great opportunity to remind Clyburn and his colleagues of those limits when it hears oral arguments in the case of U.S. v. Comstock. At issue is the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which empowers federal officials to order the indefinite civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" persons who have finished serving a federal sentence, or who are currently in the custody of the attorney general because they were found mentally incompetent to stand trial. In other words, the government isn’t willing to let these people back on the streets.

In its brief to the Supreme Court, the government argues that Congress possesses this authority under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause, which grants Congress the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States."

Yet as the text itself clearly specifies, any law passed under the Necessary and Proper Clause must also be tied to a specifically enumerated constitutional power, either one of the "foregoing powers" listed in Article I, Sec. 8, or one of the "other powers vested by this Constitution." As James Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention, the Necessary and Proper Clause "only extended to the enumerated powers. Should Congress attempt to extend it to any power not enumerated, it would not be warranted by the clause."

So where among the "foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution" did Congress happen to find an explicitly enumerated power to indefinitely detain "sexually dangerous" prisoners?

The answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution provides no such authority. Indeed, as a superb friend of the court brief filed in the case by Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett makes clear, "However well intentioned Congress may have been, it had no power to legislate for the purpose of protecting the public from dangerous persons.... The Necessary and Proper Clause is not an independent source of Congressional power."