Ehrlich Errs with Project Exile

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Ehrlich Errs with Project Exile
In his “State of the State” address last week, Maryland Governor
Robert Ehrlich passionately endorsed Project Exile, a federal
gun-prosecution program originally developed in Richmond, Virginia.
According to Ehrlich, Maryland can dramatically reduce crime by
adopting Exile and ramping up federal prosecution of gun-law
violations ordinarily handled in state courts. But Maryland would be
ill-advised to take Ehrlich’s advice. Exile makes for an effective
sound-bite, but it’s terrible public policy. The program is
unconstitutional, dangerous to the rule of law, and does little to
reduce violent crime. Under Project Exile, crimes typically
prosecuted at the state level — such as possession of a firearm by a
former felon, drug user, or illegal alien — are handled in federal
court, where mandatory minimum sentences and the possibility of
serving time out of state are said to provide a stronger deterrent.
Maryland’s new governor isn’t alone in his praise for Project Exile:
President Bush has made an Exile-style effort to ramp up federal
gun-law prosecutions the centerpiece of his crime control efforts.
It’s ironic that the effort to federalize the prosecution of gun
crimes has come from the Republican Party, which likes to style
itself as the party of federalism and the 10th Amendment. The
statutes Exile is based on flagrantly violate the 10th Amendment,
which states that powers not delegated to the federal government by
the Constitution are reserved to the states or to the people. There
is no constitutional authority for the federal government to
prosecute garden-variety gun crimes that are already illegal in all
50 states. And when the federal government takes on jobs it shouldn’t
have, it often shirks the jobs it should: Judge Fred Motz, of the
U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Baltimore, has
warned that the frenzy to federalize gun crimes could have a
“devastating” impact on the ability of the federal courts to do their
job effectively.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/02-12-03-2.html