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Oral Argument

(0:00)Paul D. Clement

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:

If the statute at issue here really does reach every malicious use of chemicals anywhere in the nation, as the government insists, then it clearly exceeds Congress's limited and enumerated powers.

This Court's cases have made clear that it is a bedrock principle of our federalist system that Congress lacks a general police power to criminalize conduct without regard to a jurisdictional element or some nexus to a matter of distinctly Federal concern.

The President's negotiation and the Senate's ratification of a treaty with a foreign nation does not change that bedrock principle of our constitutional system.

(26:20)Donald B. Verrilli, Jr.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:

The framers gave the Federal Government exclusive control over the treaty function to ensure that it could knit the nation together as one and allow it to be fully sovereign in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Petitioner's ad hoc “ too local ” limit on the treaty power can't be squared with a judgment the framers made, this Court's precedent, or consistent historical practice since the time of the founding, and it would compromise foreign affairs and national security interests of the first order.