'FEDERAL DAY' ISN'T WHAT OUR FOUNDING FATHERS HAD IN MIND FOR JUSTICE

LET'S FIND that wise man or woman who first uttered the saying "Don't make
a federal case out of it." Then let's bring him or her - or a descendant,
if that person is dead - to Baltimore and have a chat with our mayor and
police commissioner.

Mayor Martin O'Malley and police Commissioner Ed Norris are feeling
especially chipper these days. The reason? "Federal day" might finally come
to the Charm
City-That-Reads-When-Its-Citizens-Are-Not-Dodging-Bullets-Fired-By-Criminals.

Sun reporters Del Quentin Wilber and Gail Gibson wrote about "federal day"
in a Thursday story. Norris said Thomas DiBiagio, the U.S. attorney for
Maryland, might support an idea that goes something like this: Pick one day
a month. Any day. All those unlucky enough to be arrested that day on drug,
gun or homicide charges won't be tried in state court. A trip to federal
court awaits them, with its tough-hombre U.S. attorneys and mandatory
minimum sentences and high conviction rates.

Doesn't that sound peachy? Norris thinks so.

"I've seen this work before," Norris told Wilber. "We'll see it work again."

O'Malley, too, is happier than a pauper who has just learned he's been
named the sole heir to Bill Gates' fortune. Hizzoner has promised DiBiagio
lunch or gift certificates if he enacts federal day. DiBiagio, according to
the article, has promised to "take a hard look" at the idea.

Here's a hot flash for O'Malley, Norris and DiBiagio: Take a hard look at
the Constitution instead. See any place in there that suggests the powers
of the federal and state governments are divided and that the powers of the
federal government are limited? Anything in there to suggest the Founding
Fathers ever intended for matters that are and should be handled in state
courts on a regular basis to be tried at the federal level as much as they
are today?

So, class, today's civics lesson will be on that darned annoying
Constitution and what the Founding Fathers - those old, white, male fogies
- - meant when they wrote it. Article III deals with the judicial power of
the U.S. government. That power, the fogies insisted, is "vested in one
supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to
time ordain and establish."

Anticipating that guys like Norris, O'Malley and DiBiagio would come along,
the fogies went a step further in Article III, Section 2, Part 1:

"The judicial power shall extend to all cases ... affecting ambassadors,
other public ministers and consuls; to all cases of admiralty and maritime
jurisdiction; to controversies between two or more states; ... between
citizens of different states; between citizens of the same state claiming
lands under grants of different states."

Little did the fogies know that, more than 200 years in the future, there
would be state and federal laws for the same offenses. They could never
have envisioned a Project Exile, a program that started in Richmond, Va.,
with the noble goal of reducing homicides and gun crimes. Under Project
Exile, felons who commit crimes with guns are taken to federal court. If
convicted, they are sentenced to a federal prison, not a state prison.

Inspired by Project Exile, President Bush has proposed Project Safe
Neighborhoods, another program that will have gun-toting varmints who
commit crimes hauled into federal court. Conservatives across the country
have supported Project Exile and Project Safe Neighborhoods. Conservatives,
in each case, are dead wrong.

There's a reason conservatives support such a flagrant intrusion of the
federal government into a state matter. Back Project Exile and Project Safe
Neighborhoods, the thinking goes, and the anti-gun lobby will get off our
necks about being "extremists" on the issues of gun control and the Second
Amendment. A compromise will have been reached.

Those of us who believe the Second Amendment applies to individual, not
collective, rights - as a 1939 Supreme Court ruling tried to con Americans
into believing - see no need for such compromises. Just tell the anti-gun
nuts that we're right and they're wrong on this issue and that the debate
is over.

Likewise, someone needs to tell O'Malley, Norris and DiBiagio that state
crimes need to be handled in state court and that the ever-expanding and
intrusive federal government needs to be held in check. "Federal day" is an
idea whose time should never have come.