Supreme Court Rules 9-0 Against Obama Administration’s ‘Boundless’ Interpretation of Chemical Weapons Law

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously today
against the Obama administration in a major case testing the reach
of federal power.

At issue in Bond v. United States was the conviction of
Carol Anne Bond, a Pennsylvania woman sentenced
to six years in federal prison under the Chemical Weapons
Implementation Act after she smeared two toxic substances on the
door knob and car door of a woman who had been carrying on an
affair with Bond’s husband. According to Bond, the federal
government exceeded its enumerated powers by making a federal crime
out of her purely local offense. Today, the Supreme Court ruled in
Bond’s favor.

The Obama administration’s “boundless” interpretation of the
chemical weapons law, declared the opinion of Chief Justice John
Roberts, “would transform the statute from one whose core concerns
are acts of war, assassination, and terrorism into a massive
federal anti-poisoning regime that reaches the simplest of
assaults.”

Joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia
Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, Roberts found that the federal law
simply had no application to “an amateur attempt by a jilted wife
to injure her husband’s lover, which ended up causing only a minor
thumb burn readily treated by rinsing with water.” The power to
prosecute such acts rests entirely in the hands of the states, the
Court concluded. “There is no reason to think the sovereign nations
that ratified the [Chemical Weapons] Convention were interested in
anything like Bond’s common law assault.”

Writing separately, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas,
and Samuel Alito concurred in the view that Bond’s conviction
should be overturned, but argued that Roberts’ narrow ruling did
not go far enough. In contrast to Roberts, these three justices
argued that the chemical weapons law did cover Bond’s
conduct, and therefore the law should be struck down on
constitutional grounds. “As sweeping and unsettling as the Chemical
Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998 may be, it is clear
beyond doubt that it covers what Bond did,” wrote Justice Scalia.
“So we are forced to decide—there is no way around it—whether the
Act’s application to what Bond did was constitutional.
I would hold that it was not.”

The opinion in Bond. v. United States is available
here.