[SauciestGNU]

I think it's farcical that this Court will hold the other branches to the strictly enumerated powers granted by the Constitution and yet restrains itself in no similar manner. "Emanations and penumbras" are just a mid-century aristocratic articulation of the idea that if you exercise multiple protected rights simultaneously, it follows that the sum of that conduct would also be constitutionally protected. People may disagree with the verbiage, or the outcome, but it is in fact quite easy to understand.

[rayiner]

The Court isn’t holding Congress to “strictly enumerated powers.” The constitution doesn’t say anything about the federal government being able to enact environmental legislation, but the Supreme Court has widely interpreted the Commerce Clause to allow it.

The non-delegation cases are about whether the elaborate and explicit separation of powers in the Constitution even means anything at all. The notion that you can have executive agencies making “regulations” with the force of law, and adjudicating cases through administrative judges, is already inconsistent with the idea of having three separate branches of government with clearly differentiated powers. The only question is whether that constitutional separation is mostly meaningless, or completely meaningless.

And the “emanations and penumbras” has nothing to do with “multiple protected rights.” If you are carrying a gun while protesting, that’s covered by the second and first amendments and you don’t need anything on top of that. “Emanations and penumbras” is a way to pull “rights” out of your ass that aren’t in the document. It’s classic mid-20th century white guy pontificating.