The Federal Reporter with Key-Number Annotations, Volume 256: Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Courts of Appeals and District Courts of the United States, May-July, 1919. Page: 106
xiv, 992 p. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this legislative document.
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'106 '256 iPlTl'r - nrtEPOi' R
the Legislature having definitely subdivided and classified tfie subjects
iof prohibition in separate and distinct sections, and having by the last
section of the act declared that it must be considered separable, so that
the validity of one section should not affect the rest Neither the
argument of defendants, nor the decision of the Court of Criminal
Appeals, has any force against the present indictment. The Reed
Amendment, under which the government prosecutes, is framed in the
alternative, or disjunctive, and as clearly prohibits transportation into
a state where manufacture is prohibited as where the prohibition is
of the sale, and if the contention of the government is correct that the
state of Texas has made a vilid prohibition of manufacture, the de-
murrers must fail, even though it be conceded, as it must be in this
court, in view of the ruling of the Court of Criminal Appeals, that there
is no valid prohibition in the state of the sale of liquor. We thus reach
the simple question:
"Does the delegation to the qualified voters of a county. or subdivision
thereof, of the right to determine the qlle~tionl ' ,,l bition of the sale of in-
toxicating liquors within Its llinit,. confer upon it the right to alo determine
whether the manufacture of liquor shall be prohibited I its limits?"
Nowhere in section 20 does the word "manufacture" appear, and an
affirmative answer to the question can only be given if it be held that
the power to prohibit the sale necessarily involved the power to pro-
hibit or authorize the manufacture Apart from the principle of stat-
utory construction, already adverted to, that every intendment must
be indulged in favor of legislative power, common sense and common
experience unite in declaring that, not only is the power to prohibit the
manufacture not a necessary content of the power to prohibit the sale,
but that the two subjects are independent of each other, and so wholly
distinct and separate in their physical incidents and character as that
not even the most strained construction could extend the word "sale"
to include or embrace the word "manufacture "
[3 1 The argument of the defendants is the lame one that the spirit
of the constitutional enactment was to confer upon political subdivi-
sions general power over the handling and disposition of liquor, and
that, if the power be conceded to the Legislature to prohibit the man-
ufacture. that power will indirectly, by reducing the subjects of sale.
infringe upon the power of political subdivisions over the matter of
sale. In the first place, the argument that the ,pirit of the Constitution
confers on counties or subdivisions thereof any other power than its
words express is not impressive This court does not recognize in coun-
sel for defendants such spn itual kinship with the framers of the Con-
stitution as to entitle them to announce with confidence what spirit was
intended to be breathed into the body of that act: and in the second
place, this attempt to find a constitutional limitation in the spirit as
opposed to the language of the law received complete refutation in
Brown v. City of Galveston. 97 Tex 1, 75 S W. 488, in which case
Judge Brown met the same character of contention as follows:
"The doctrine is in conflict with the well-settled prl'ilclle of constitutional
construction that the power of the Legislature cau be restrained only by a
prohibition expressed or implied from some prIovision or pi ovisionS of the Con-
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The Federal Reporter with Key-Number Annotations, Volume 256: Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Courts of Appeals and District Courts of the United States, May-July, 1919., legislative document, 1919; Saint Paul, Minnesota. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38827/m1/120/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.