Regular reader Kevin Corcoran sent me the following. I’m posting with his permission and then I’ll add my own thoughts.
Here’s Kevin:
While I was out on vacation last week, I had the opportunity to try some new craft beers. In general, this is a wonderful time to be a person who enjoys beer–the varieties of craft beer and number of local breweries have skyrocketed over the last few years. But, because I’m me, I couldn’t just enjoy some of the local offerings without having thoughts about the nature of government and freedom, and the following thought occurred to me.
Isn’t the 18th amendment remarkable?
You might take that to mean I think it’s remarkable that it was possible to get the support needed to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcoholic beverages in the United States–and that certainly is remarkable in its own right. But I have a different take on it. It’s remarkable because it illustrates the degree to which lawmakers used to be constrained by the constitution, and how little of that constraint is present today.
Madison once described how the Constitution would limit the power of the federal government with these words: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which the last power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.” And, for a while at least, the powers of the federal government really were few and defined and focused in the way Madison advocated. That was enough the case that if the federal government wanted to ban the use of a mind-altering drug like alcohol, it lacked the authority to do so, because controlling what substances people were able to ingest was not among the “few and defined” powers enumerated in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution. For the federal government to pass such a law, and for that law to be consistent with the Constitution, the Constitution would need to be amended – and it was.
These days, instead of amending the Constitution to allow for whatever new powers are believed should be given to the federal government, we seem to have fallen into a system where the courts interpret the enumerated powers in the Constitution so broadly that limitations have all but ceased to exist in practice. This is perhaps most infamous in the Wickard v. Filburn case, where the Supreme Court interpreted the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 so broadly that a person growing his own food to feed his own animals, and who did not sell that food to anyone, across state lines or otherwise, was still engaging in an act of “interstate commerce” by doing so, and under the authority of the federal government. With court rulings broadening federal authority so much, why spend the time on persuasion and debate to build the broad consensus and support necessary to amend the Constitution anymore?
It used to be that if the federal government wanted to control alcoholic beverages, the Constitution needed to be amended to allow it. Now, it’s just taken as given that of course the federal government has the authority to control just about every aspect of what people can consume, food, drug, or otherwise–no Constitutional adjustment needed. I prefer the old system. Alas, I don’t know how to get back there from here.
His thoughts led to 4 of my own.
First, while I share James Madison‘s view of the U.S. Constitution, not everyone at the time, even those who put it together, did. As my economic historian friend Jeff Hummel put it to me once, the U.S. Constitution was a compromise. It was the most statist the statists could get. And it was the most pro-limited government the limited government people could get. In short, it was an equilibrium. That’s how to understand vague things like the first few words of Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; (italics added).
Second, notice how selective the Madison view was even before Prohibition. The Harrison Act, which regulated drugs such as cocaine and opium, was passed in 1914. The players who were victorious didn’t seem to think that they needed a Constitutional amendment to do so. Although, to be fair, I should note that they did it in the form of a tax, which Congress had the power to do.
Third, back to Madison’s, Corcoran’s, and my view, I’ve often wondered how so many Constitutional lawyers, even those who seem to share Madison’s view, can justify the federal government having any role in immigration. I’ve never received a satisfactory answer. A few years ago, I was at a conference in which I had a chance to ask a question about that. I can’t tell you the name of the law professor because the proceeds were conducted under the Chatham House rule.
I asked, “Where in the U.S. Constitution do you find support for either the President or Congress having a role in immigration law?”
I was shocked by his answer because he didn’t even try to answer. Instead, he painted a picture of what it would be like to have no federal role in immigration. Whether or not his dire picture was accurate, he seemed to think that was grounds enough for the federal role. Because of the rules at the time, I didn’t get a follow up.
Fourth, Kevin’s thoughts reminded me of something I read about Biden in the summer of 2008, shortly after Obama chose him as his running mate, and how it contrasted with FDR.
A reporter reported that because Biden regularly took Amtrak, he would almost certainly push to increase the subsidy for Amtrak. The reporter wrote this matter of factly, as if such a conclusion were obvious. It was obvious, but only because of the weakening of the belief in limited government.
Contrast this with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was not exactly a believer in limited government. FDR had polio, starting in 1921. He became president in 1933 and was president until his death in 1945. He founded the March of Dimes in 1938 to help people with polio.
Think about that. While being the most powerful U.S. president in history up until that point, he founded a voluntary organization to go after polio. He didn’t start a government agency or push for government funding to do so. And that was probably as unremarkable then as Biden’s purported favoring of further subsidizing his own form of transportation was unremarkable 70 years later.
READER COMMENTS
Kevin Corcoran
Mar 14 2022 at 6:12pm
Some further thoughts, inspired by your thoughts!
Regarding the vagueness of things like the general welfare clause – I’ve always been iffy about that as well. Still, it’s worth noting, as you point out, that this is specifically mentioned as applying to the federal government’s ability to tax. If you squint, I can see how one can make the case that taxing certain drugs and using that revenue in support of the general welfare is constitutional. But the authority to outright ban substances doesn’t seem to follow from that first clause.
The reaction from the lawyer regarding the immigration question reminds me of something I frequently see on another hot topic – gun control. I’m no legal expert, and I’m perfectly prepared to accept that there are complexities about the Second Amendment that just aren’t on my radar. Still, I’ve noticed that when asked how a particular piece of legislation restricting gun ownership is consistent with the Second Amendment, the responses I get usually tend to be about why widespread private gun ownership is bad, or harmful, or things of that nature. And that’s answering a different question. Saying “Widespread private gun ownership is bad because XYZ reasons” can be an argument for why the Second Amendment ought to be repealed, but it doesn’t do any work at all to explain why a particular gun law is or isn’t consistent with the Second Amendment.
Your thoughts about polio and FDR are very interesting as well. Imagine if politicians these days took opportunities to encourage and inspire community action and voluntary cooperation among the public, instead of simply growing the state. It would be nice to see more of that.
David Henderson
Mar 14 2022 at 7:40pm
You wrote:
Exactly. This is an instance of what Daniel Kahneman discussed in his excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow. The person answers the question he wants to answer rather than the question that was asked.
Jon Murphy
Mar 14 2022 at 6:36pm
Keeping in mind I am no law-guy, my understanding is that the Immigration powers is implied by the Constitution. I know the Supreme Court has said it’s implied through the Foreign Policy clause of Art 1, Section 8 (Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 1893). I have seen others argue that the power is implied in the “repel foreign invasions” role of the Federal Government, but that seems weak (at best) to me.
To the larger point:
I suppose there is a way to square the circle of the 18th Amendment and the Harrison Act. Congress will sometimes try to pass an Amendment at the same time as legislation if the fear is the legislation is borderline unconstitutional. For example, the 14th Amendment was designed, in part, to prevent the judicial repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
David Henderson
Mar 14 2022 at 7:38pm
You wrote:
But for about the first 90 years after the Constitution was adopted in 1787, it was state governments that controlled immigration and the feds had no role. Did it take smart people that long to understand that implication? That seems unlikely.
Jon Murphy
Mar 14 2022 at 7:51pm
Agreed. And given the case I cited was whether or not the government could expel Chinese simply because they’re Chinese, I’m thinking the ruling had certain…extra-legal motivations
Kevin Corcoran
Mar 14 2022 at 7:55pm
I, too, am not a law guy, despite having watched many seasons of Law and Order. But I’ve never been fully satisfied with the suggestion that a particular power, while not clearly granted to the federal government by the Constitution, is nonetheless implied by the Constitution. My main dissatisfaction stems from the Madisonian idea that the powers granted to the federal government by the Constitution are both few and defined. I’ve never heard a convincing argument for how government power can be simultaneously defined, but also only implied.
If the authority to carry out certain acts isn’t actually present in the text, and can only be seen through implication, then that authority is not defined by the Constitution in any way I can make sense of that term. Similarly, once we start granting authority to the federal government based on both what is in the text, and what is taken to be implied by the text but not actually contained in it, such powers cease to be “few” anymore. They become all but limitless at that point. And that seems to be the direction things are moving, unfortunately.
Jon Murphy
Mar 14 2022 at 9:11pm
I agree with you, but let me play Devil’s Advocate for the sake of discussion.
“Implied” means that something is a logical consequence of something else. Thus, we could say that if X is defined, then Y is implied by X. For example, Congress has the power to declare war. Implied in that is Congress also has the power to make peace.
Kevin Corcoran
Mar 14 2022 at 9:38pm
That’s a solid response, and in a way it helps to clear up what I find unpersuasive about “implied” powers as the term is often used. I think there’s an equivocation that goes on between two related, but distinct meanings of the word “implied.” In one sense, the term is used to mean “a logically necessary consequence.” This is a strong sense of the word implied. You have your premises, you have rules of inference and deduction, and the conclusion is said to be implied by those premises and deductions. On the other hand, the word is also used to mean something much weaker, more like “suggested, but not necessarily true.” We use the word in this sense when we say things like “The fact that they hung up the phone without saying goodbye first implies they were mad at you.” Anger is implied by that action in the weak sense, but it’s not a logically necessary cause of that action in the strong sense. There are many other possible explanations.
It seems to me that the vast majority of the “implied” powers claimed on behalf of the government are implied in that second, weaker, and undefined sense. To use your example – nobody has ever felt the need to claim (have they?) that the power to make peace is “implied” by the Constitution. It only seems to be invoked when the “implication” is not of the logically necessary variety, but rather in the weak, suggested sense.
Jon Murphy
Mar 15 2022 at 7:34am
Perhaps, but let me offer a different explanation where the stronger version can still hold.
Take as a premise that courts only get involved when there is ambiguity in the law. My war/peace example is not a good example because it’s not ambiguous (which goes to your comment “nobody has ever felt the need to claim (have they?) that the power to make peace is “implied” by the Constitution”). But for other things, what the law says can be ambiguous. Given the ambiguity, the judge must try to ferret out the logical implications of a given law/legislation. Thus, the judge may rule that X is implied by Y, but given the ambiguity of Y, X may appear to be in the weak sense of imply but is actually an attempt to be in the strong sense.
I’m speculating here. This is so far outside my wheelhouse that my comments should be taken with a grain of salt
Kevin Corcoran
Mar 15 2022 at 1:12pm
That seems to run back into the issue I was having before – just like I don’t see how “implied” (in the weak sense) is compatible with something being “defined,” I also don’t see how the powers entailed by a law can be simultaneously “ambiguous” and “defined.” It seems to me that the more ambiguous a law is, the less well defined it is, and vice versa.
The ambiguity of the law also seems to work against the strong, deductive sense of how “implied” can work. Normally, we’d say something like “A implies B. A. Therefore, B.” But appealing to the ambiguity of a law’s phrasing changes this to “A implies B. Maybe A, but maybe not because it’s ambiguous. Therefore, B.”
In fairness, though, I don’t want to downplay the difficulty of ambiguity. Communication is hard – made harder by the fact that we reflexively tend to think it’s easy. You just put your thoughts into words, and then the other person hears/reads your words and understands what you meant! Right?? Sadly, no – it’s not that easy, even with the best intentions of all parties involved. It’s probably harder than most people think to write a law whose meaning is unambiguous and requires no interpretation at all. But that’s also why its important to have a system for how to handle ambiguity – and I think the system most in spirit with the ideas behind America’s founding was “when there is ambiguity in how the law is written, assume the interpretation that that is consistent with the words as written and also puts the strictest control on the state’s powers.” Interpretations favoring freedom and liberty should be the default.
zeke5123
Mar 16 2022 at 5:54pm
How do you square that with Clause 18 of Art 1, Sec 8? Yes, there is a famous case on point (See McCulloch v. Maryland). I agree with the Court that the read of this clause is that there are implied powers to carry out the enumerated clauses are not complete.
With that said, I do see “necessary and proper” as also a limiting principle on implied powers. Yes, the document grants implied powers but by using both the phrase necessary and proper there is an idea that such implied powers must be narrowly tailored to the enumerated power.
So, yes there is the power to regulate interstate commerce. It may be necessary to regulate intrastate commerce as a result (see The Daniel Ball, 77 US 557) because it is so closely connected with interstate commerce (i.e., without regulating such commerce it would frustrate the interstate commerce regulation so it is necessary and it is proper because the conduct is similar in material respects to interstate commerce). But that doesn’t mean the implied power to regulate closely connected intrastate commerce extends to farming on your own behalf, such as Wickard (i.e., maybe it is necessary for the crazy New Deal scheme, but it isn’t proper in the sense the activity is so attenuated from interstate commerce).
So, I am not necessarily opposed to implied powers; I am opposed to expansive readings of implied powers (i.e., the implied power must truly be necessary and proper).
Brandon Berg
Mar 15 2022 at 2:04am
“The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”
It seems to me that this implies that after 1808 Congress shall have the authority to limit migration into the United States. Arguably this is covered under the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, provided that “commerce” is meant in the broad sense, or perhaps under the power to create a rule of naturalization.
robc
Mar 15 2022 at 9:45am
I think your example is a prime case of the distinction between strict construction and originalism.
The strict constructionist eould make your argument. The originalist would say that was only about importation of slaves and doesn’t apply to immigration.
David Henderson
Mar 15 2022 at 11:48am
robc has a good response. Of course, there is nothing to tell us whether we should apply originalism or strict construction.
But I would make a further point: Why did it take them approximately 70 years after 1808 to conclude that the feds so have say over immigration?
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 15 2022 at 8:34am
What is missing from the above discussion is how the Constitution has been interpreted and misintrepreted over the years. Many legal scholars have pointed out the original slavery compromise that was forced on the drafters in order to make it acceptable. Not only was slavery permitted but slaves, despite their lack of rights, were considered as a fractional people for the purpose of allocation of seats to the House of Representatives.
Lincoln abrogated some basic rights by suspending Habeas Corpus during the Civil War. There have been numerous problematic judicial interpretations over the years including rights conjured out of thin air (and this has been done by Justices of all political persuasions). Does anyone think that the 2nd amendment is being correctly interpreted today?
Kevin Corcoran
Mar 15 2022 at 12:37pm
Actually, how the Constitution has been misinterpreted is basically the crux of what I’m getting at. Take the Wickard v. Filburn case I mentioned above as an example. The Supreme Court held that a farmer could be legally penalized for growing wheat to feed his own livestock, because the law fell under the commerce clause in Article I Section 8. Their reasoning was that by growing his own wheat, the farmer was therefore not buying wheat to feed his livestock. By not buying wheat, he was reducing the demand for wheat in the market. This in turn can affect the price of wheat. And some portion of the wheat market is traded across state lines, by other businesses. Therefore, growing his own feed for his own use, despite it not being bought or sold to anyone and never crossing state lines, was said to still constitute “interstate commerce.” And since he was engaged in interstate commerce, the federal government had the right to stop him.
I think this is a gross misinterpretation of the Constitution. This description of what it means to be engaged in interstate commerce is so broad and vague that it can be used to classify any activity as interstate commerce. It certainly doesn’t make the powers of the federal government “few and defined.” It makes them limitless and amorphous.
David Henderson
Mar 15 2022 at 5:34pm
You ask:
I don’t, but I have a sense that your and my reasons are very different.
Michael Rulle
Mar 15 2022 at 8:48am
One thing seems likely, we are never going back. However, there is good news I believe. Since 2000, 36% of all Supreme Court decisions were 9-0. Another 16% were 7-2 or 8-1. 6-3 were 30% Less than 20% were 5-4. So not everything is political.
It is the executive branch’s and independent agencies of government, whose powers are delegated to it by Congress, yet reports to the President, is where most of our non-constitutional laws are implemented, and even created. I believe it is virtually impossible to unwind this behemoth.
There is no definitive list of how many of these entities there are. Within the 12 major Departments (e.g., NIH, State, Defense, EPA, etc) there are 268 entities within the 12 major Departments. There are another 168 independent agencies outside the main bureaucracy, according to USA.Gov. This is just the federal level.
We estimate there are 3 million federal civilian employees and 20 million state and local government employees. Not all government entities are horrible—-but most are. Some are client friendly. But most are almost impossible to interact with efficiently.
robc
Mar 15 2022 at 10:52am
But what were the numbers for previous courts? I don’t think things have gotten worse, but not sure they have gotten better. But I honestly don’t know. Myinstinct is that is about the same as it has ever been, which is a kind of good news.
zeke5123
Mar 16 2022 at 6:02pm
It would be odd to see numerous 9-0 decisions. If the court is routinely in agreement, then that means circuit courts are wildly out to lunch (which does happen — see the figures reported above). Naturally, there will be a shift to 5-4 cases precisely because the lower courts understand the outcome on 8-1 or 9-0 decisions; it is in the 5-4 or 6-3 decisions that the true ambiguity lies.
robc
Mar 17 2022 at 1:40pm
Midkiff was 9-0 in 1984. Kelo was 5-4 in 2005. So that was an improvement of 4 in 21 years.
Michael
Mar 15 2022 at 11:51am
I am skeptical about some premises of this argument. (I am not saying they are wrong, necessarily).
The author seems to view federal laws and constitutional amendments as things that are “passed” by the federal government. This is not really the case, as a constitutional amendment must be ratified by 3/4 of the states. The federal government may want a particular amendment, but it takes relatively few states to exercise a veto of said amendment. (See, Equal Rights Amendment). I’m not sure this matters for the argument but it stood out.
The author implicitly assumes that the reason for passing an constitutional amendment is a recognition that the federal government lacks the power to pass a law. That is certainly one potential rationale for passing an amendment, but not the only reason. Amendments are harder to enact but also harder to real compared with laws – someone interested in lasting change might prefer to go the Amendment route than the la route. Would Prohibition itself have lasted 14 years if it had been a law? There is often talk of a Balanced Budget Amendment, even though the federal govenment obviously has the power to pass a Balanced Budget Law.
There was a prohibiton law of sorts prior to the passage of the amendment. A wartime emergency law banning the sale of beverages with an alcohol content of >1% was passed, theoretically to conserve grain during wartime but the law did not pass until after the armistice and did not take effect until mid 1919 after the war was over.
Prior to the repeal of prohibition, FDR signed a law allowing the purchase and sale of alcoholic beverages of up to 3.2% alcohol content – it did this by redefining the term “intoxicating beverage” as containing more than that amount of alcohol.
Kevin Corcoran
Mar 15 2022 at 12:45pm
That’s not my view, but it’s also true I didn’t really spell out much about the actual process of amendments being passed, so fair enough. However, that process you described is what I was gesturing at when I said:
It used to be the case that fundamentally altering the authority of the federal government took the process you describe, which required, as I said “persuasion and debate to build…broad consensus and support.” Now no such consensus needs to be built, nor widespread support garnered anymore. I think that’s a move for the worse.
Nope, I don’t assume that. Or, at least I don’t assume that it is the reason for passing an amendment, as in the one and only reason. But, as you also note, it is still one reason to do so. And in the context of this discussion, it was the reason that seemed most relevant.
TMC
Mar 15 2022 at 12:29pm
I’d say “provide for the common defence”. Foreigners could be considered invaders if not given permission to enter. This would give the power to at least vet immigrants, but no necessarily refuse them if they pass vetting.
Capt. J Parker
Mar 15 2022 at 1:32pm
Where indeed. I believe in high school we were told it was derived from Article 1 section 8 power of congress to establish a uniform rule for naturalization. Below is a more embellished answer that, interestingly, isn’t really all that much different from the non-answer given by the constitutional lawyer. Read the who thing here.
§ 2-1.3 National Sovereignty
The Court eventually found the source of the federal power to regulate immigration in a combination of international and constitutional legal principles. The Chinese Exclusion Case (Sup.Ct.1889) was the first case to hold that the federal power to exclude non-citizens is an incident of national sovereignty. The Court reasoned that every national government has the inherent authority to protect the national public interest. Immigration is a matter of vital national concern. Furthermore, it is the role of the federal government to oversee matters of national concern, while it is the province of the states to govern local matters. Therefore, the Court found that the inherent sovereign power to regulate immigration clearly resides in the federal government. Subsequent cases reinforced national sovereignty as the source of federal power to control immigration and consistently reasserted the plenary and unqualified scope of this power. Fong Yue Ting v. United States (Sup.Ct.1893) explicitly held that the power to expel or deport (now “remove”) non-citizens rests upon the same ground as the exclusion power and is equally “absolute and unqualified.”
§ 2-1.4 Delegated Versus Inherent Power
In United States v. CurtissBWright Export Corp. (Sup.Ct.1936), the Court clearly distinguished between powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution and inherent sovereign powers. Delegated powers over internal affairs were carved from the general mass of legislative powers previously governed by the states. States never possessed international powers, however, and the inherent sovereign powers were transferred from Great Britain to the union of states when the U.S. declared its independence. These powers were thus vested in the national government before the Constitution was written and exist without regard to any constitutional grant. It has been suggested that the apparently limitless scope of federal authority over immigration results from this undefined and indefinable source. The Supreme Court has upheld every exercise of this power and has consistently termed it “plenary and unqualified.”
Capt. J Parker
Mar 15 2022 at 1:35pm
Sorry for the bad link above. Here it is: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/immigrationlaw/chapter2.html
Tom Means
Mar 15 2022 at 4:00pm
“This is perhaps most infamous in the Wickard v. Filburn case, where the Supreme Court interpreted the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 so broadly that a person growing his own food to feed his own animals, and who did not sell that food to anyone, across state lines or otherwise, was still engaging in an act of “interstate commerce” by doing so, and under the authority of the federal government.”
I agree with you Kevin. This ruling basically claims that everything depends on everything and there is no limit on applying the commerce clause.
A similar approach was asserted by Federal Judges when hearing arguments against some of Trump’s EO’s banning certain people from entering the country. State attorneys representing state universities argued that they had standing because not allowing an individual to enter the country, resulted in lost domestic spending, which resulted in fewer tax revenues. The Federal Judges accepted this argument. Since any spending raises tax revenue either through sales tax or increasing someone’s income, the state could always argue that they have standing.
James Anderson Merritt
Mar 15 2022 at 6:52pm
From the article:
I was shocked by his answer because he didn’t even try to answer. Instead, he painted a picture of what it would be like to have no federal role in immigration. Whether or not his dire picture was accurate, he seemed to think that was grounds enough for the federal role.
I was also shocked, when, long ago, I looked into the Supreme Court decisions that confirmed Federal authority over immigration. They didn’t even bother to paint the picture that the law professor apparently painted in answer to you. For the Justices, it was obvious that, while not discussed explicitly in the Constitution, immigration power was a natural feature of the sovereignty inherent in a national government. “We say so,” in other words. The material, cited upthread by Capt. J. Parker, well summarizes that position. However, the passage on “Delegated vs. Inherent Power” asserts that the States never had “international” powers, which seems at least partly false to me. The Constitution speaks of the “Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit…” This suggests that, prior to the Constitution, States had indeed exercised the “international power” of immigration authority, directly and publicly.
Jim Glass
Mar 18 2022 at 9:32pm
I’ve often wondered how so many Constitutional lawyers, even those who seem to share Madison’s view, can justify the federal government having any role in immigration. I’ve never received a satisfactory answer.
1 — Capt. J Parker provides the link to the long full legal analysis above (beat me to it). The in-a-thimble answer: “Sovereignty”.
The USA is a sovereign nation (its sovereignty carried over from Britain at the political separation). Sovereign nations have a number of inherent features. Among them is the right to control movement over the sovereign’s borders, including movement of people. (If one doubts it, list the number of sovereign nations in history that said they didn’t have that right.)
2 — I illegally home brewed beer during and after my time in law school in the late 1970s. No craft beers then! Craft beer fans, count your blessings! ‘
In those days it was basically Budweiser, Schlitz, as imports Heineken and Becks, and the exotic premium Coors smuggled in from the western USA (distribution prohibited in the east.) If you had Coors you were somebody! This was in Manhattan, NYC. To get brewing ingredients and equipment one had to go to wine-making supply stores. Making one’s own wine was legal, for some discriminatory reason.
Home brewing became legal in 1979, soon followed by a Cambrian explosion of small brew pubs, some of which survived and evolved into craft brewers. In my own tiny way I contributed to the process. It was a very exciting time for beer fans!
One odd thing was that when legal distribution of Coors arrived in the east, it suddenly tasted like water.
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