Does United States v. Comstock Carry Possible Implications for Counterterrorism Administrative Detention?

The US Supreme Court accepted cert this morning in the case of United States v. Comstock; the cert papers can be found at SCOTUSblog and thanks to Jonathan Adler at Volokh for the tip.  Volokh Conspiracy has a series of prior posts on the subject, accessible here.  The case is a challenge under the Commerce Clause to the post-sentence civil commitment regime for sex offenders passed by Congress.  The issue (picked up from SCOTUSBlog) is:

Whether Congress had the constitutional authority to enact 18 U.S.C. 4248, which authorizes court-ordered civil commitment by the federal government of (1) “sexually dangerous” persons who are already in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, but who are coming to the end of their federal prison sentences, and (2) “sexually dangerous” persons who are in the custody of the Attorney General because they have been found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

As Eugene Volokh and others comment in the Volokh Conspiracy series of posts (prior to cert being granted today):

In United States v. Comstock, a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit (consisting of a Clinton appointee, a George W. Bush appointee, and a senior district court judge appointed by Reagan) held unconstitutional 18 U.S.C. § 4248, which “authorizes the federal government to civilly commit, in a federal facility, any ‘sexually dangerous’ person ‘in the custody’ of the Bureau of Prisons — even after that person has completed his entire prison sentence.” The panel held that Congress’s enumerated powers do not reach this far, because Congress lacks a general police power aimed at protecting the public at large from crime.

Here’s an excerpt [from the Fourth Circuit opinion], though it focuses on only part of the government’s argument:

“Federal commitment of “sexually dangerous persons” may well be — like the suppression of guns in schools or the redress of gender-motivated violence — a sound proposal as a matter of social policy. But policy justifications do not create congressional authority….

The Government … contends that § 4248 constitutes a necessary and proper exercise of its power to prevent “sex-related crimes.” But the federal government simply has no power to broadly regulate all sex-related crimes, as § 4248 purports to do.

Consistent with Congress’s limited powers, federal statutes regulating sex crimes are limited in number and breadth, specifically requiring a connection to interstate commerce or limiting their scope to the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. In contrast, § 4248 targets “sexual dangerousness” generally, without any requirement that this undefined danger relate to conduct that the federal government may constitutionally regulate. Because most crimes of sexual violence violate state and not federal law, many commitments under § 4248 would prevent conduct prohibited only by state law. Section 4248 thus sweeps far too broadly to be a valid effort to preventfederal criminal activity….

At its core, the Government’s argument attempts to “pile inference upon inference” so as to “convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States.” Were we to accept the Government’s logic, Congress could authorize the civil commitment of a person on a showing that he posed a general risk of any sexually violent conduct, even though not all, or even most, of this potential conduct violated federal law. This argument would convert the federal government’s limited power to criminalize narrow forms of sexual violence into the general power to regulate all sexual violence, including acts which violate no criminal statute. Congressional power does not reach so far.”

Why do I raise this here at OJ?  To ask whether the outcome, or the reasoning, in this case might have an impact on proposals – some of them endorsed by me, Ben Wittes, and others – for administrative detention of terrorists suspects who the government believes cannot be tried but must be held, or even – as in the situation here – have served their sentences if they were tried, but whom the government believes still remain too dangerous to release.  The fact that these types of arrangements have been blessed by the Supreme Court – wrongly in my view, and by a divided court, but blessed nonetheless – is not irrelevant to the claim that administrative detention on the basis of even an inchoate threat is not always, flat-out impermissible.

The obvious response is that even if the Supreme Court agreed with the Commerce Clause challenge here, the challenge here is a federalism one: it is a contention that the statute at issue impermissibly creates a general Federal police power that is Constitutionally reserved to the states.  The terrorism related administrative detention proposals do obviously go to Federal power.  Either they rest upon some commander-in-chief, or war powers claim, in which case whatever challenges can be made are not about the Commerce Clause or things reserved to the states, or else they are about something that Congress and the Executive do have power to undertake (whatever limits might be placed on them by the Court re habeas, etc.), foreign relations, the common protection of the commonweal from enemies and attack, and so on.

All true.  Yet I would urge at a minimum, the way in which arguments and opinions are rendered in this case might indeed have collateral effects upon how administrative detention arrangements in counterterrorism, particularly – as is my preference – if they are not grounded in commander-in-chief and war powers, but instead on some non-armed conflict-related statutory scheme, one grounded explicitly in counterterrorism as its own cognizable statutory category.  One can imagine, for example, a Court opinion using broad language intended to address questions of sex offenders but arguably sweeping in questions of persons who might pose a risk of terrorism.  I don’t mean this in any deep constitutional sense; only that any case dealing with forms of administrative detention is worth watching closely to see if it has collateral implications for counterterrorism detentions.