One Toke Over the Line: Prohibition, Marijuana, and the Limits of Federal Power
Release Date: 07/11/2026
Whose Religion?
America at 250: Due Diligence
The fight over church and state is back in the classroom. Texas requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools. Similar laws have emerged in Louisiana and Arkansas, while states are also considering Bible-based curriculum and school chaplain programs. Supporters argue these policies recognize America's history and religious heritage. Opponents say they cross a constitutional line by putting government behind a particular faith. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman examine how an argument that began before the Constitution was...
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Faith Without Force
America at 250: Due Diligence
Who should decide what Americans believe—and what happens when government takes a side? The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of religion while protecting its free exercise. But the phrase most closely associated with that principle—a “wall of separation between church and state”—does not appear in the Constitution. It comes from an 1802 letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman trace the origins of religious liberty from the persecution of...
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The Free Press On Trial
America at 250: Due Diligence
America at 250: Due Diligence goes live from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., for a special hour recorded in the Club's First Amendment Room. As the country marks its 250th year, hosts Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman convene a conversation on the state of a free press, introduced by National Press Club president Mark Schoeff Jr. of CQ Roll Call. The episode opens with a statement from Catherine Herridge, the Emmy Award-winning investigative correspondent who has covered national security and intelligence for ABC, Fox, and CBS. Herridge was held in civil contempt in February 2024...
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Making Friends: Benjamin Franklin and America’s First Public Diplomacy Campaign
America at 250: Due Diligence
Before the United States could win its independence, it had to convince the world that the American experiment was worth supporting. The thirteen colonies had no navy, no national treasury, and little credibility among Europe’s great powers. Defeating the British Empire would require more than success on the battlefield. The revolutionaries needed weapons, loans, trade, diplomatic recognition, and powerful foreign allies. They also had to persuade European leaders and ordinary citizens that a collection of rebellious colonies could become a stable and successful nation. In this episode of...
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The Power of War
America at 250: Due Diligence
Who decides when the United States goes to war? The Constitution divides that responsibility between Congress and the president. Congress possesses the power to declare and fund war, while the president serves as commander in chief. But from the earliest years of the republic, the boundary between those powers has been tested, stretched, and frequently blurred. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman trace the evolution of American war powers from Thomas Jefferson’s campaign against the Barbary powers to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
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One Toke Over the Line: Prohibition, Marijuana, and the Limits of Federal Power
America at 250: Due Diligence
Alcohol prohibition required the Constitution twice—once to impose it and once to repeal it. Marijuana prohibition took a different path, imposed through federal law even as a growing number of states have chosen legalization. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Steve Herman and Bill Bernardoni examine how national prohibition takes hold, what happens when Americans refuse to comply, and how conflicts between federal and state power can reshape the law. Historian Richard Hamm explains how nearly a century of temperance organizing, religious activism, women’s groups, and...
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Power Struggle: Energy, Climate, and the Future
America at 250: Due Diligence
In April 1977, Jimmy Carter told the country that solving its energy crisis would take sacrifice — that the alternative might be, in his words, a national catastrophe. Nearly fifty years later, the crisis looks different. The gas lines are gone. In their place: climate change, an aging power grid, and data centers that are starting to draw more electricity than entire cities. But the underlying argument hasn't moved an inch. Who decides what America builds? Who pays for it? And who has the authority to make that call — Washington, the states, or nobody at all? The Constitution says almost...
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The First Shot: 27 Words, 230 Years, and a Fight That Isn't Over
America at 250: Due Diligence
Twenty-seven words. That is the entire text of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And for more than two centuries, Americans have been arguing about what those twenty-seven words mean — in courtrooms, in statehouses, in campaign ads, and in the streets. The fight is about guns. But it is also about something larger: liberty and public safety, individual rights and democratic government, what the Constitution meant in 1791 and...
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The State of Control: Federalism and the Limits of Federal Power
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the oldest unsettled arguments in American life—not whether to have a national government, but how much of one. Where should power actually live: close to the people, in the states and towns where most Americans spend their lives, or at the center, in Washington? The argument was there before the ink was dry. Inside the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison pushed for what became known as the “federal negative”—a congressional veto over state laws—and lost. The states were too...
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The Key to the Cage: Is It Time for an Article V Convention?
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the most consequential — and least understood — provisions in the U.S. Constitution: Article V, and the question of whether the country should call its first-ever Article V convention. This episode opens in the summer of 1787, inside a sweltering Pennsylvania Statehouse, where George Mason — one of the sharpest minds at the Constitutional Convention — warned that the founders were “building a cage without a key.” Mason’s insistence on a state-led convention process became Article V’s...
info_outlineAlcohol prohibition required the Constitution twice—once to impose it and once to repeal it. Marijuana prohibition took a different path, imposed through federal law even as a growing number of states have chosen legalization.
In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Steve Herman and Bill Bernardoni examine how national prohibition takes hold, what happens when Americans refuse to comply, and how conflicts between federal and state power can reshape the law.
Historian Richard Hamm explains how nearly a century of temperance organizing, religious activism, women’s groups, and state-level campaigns culminated in the Eighteenth Amendment. He describes how the Anti-Saloon League pioneered modern lobbying, how World War I weakened the alcohol industry’s political resistance, and why enforcement varied dramatically from one community to another.
Yale Law professor Robert Post explores how Prohibition transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. The enormous enforcement burden helped produce major developments in search-and-seizure law, automobile searches, electronic surveillance, privacy rights, and the Court’s control over its own docket. Post also explains how former President William Howard Taft used his executive experience to reshape the role of the chief justice and modernize the federal court system.
Vanderbilt Law professor Robert Mikos brings the debate into the present. He explains why the federal government needed a constitutional amendment to impose alcohol prohibition but has used its Commerce Clause authority to prohibit marijuana. He also examines the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering principle, which allows states to decline to enforce federal marijuana policy even though they cannot repeal federal law.
Together, the conversations reveal a recurring American dilemma: What happens when Washington establishes a national rule, but the states, local authorities, and much of the public no longer accept or enforce it?
About the Hosts
Steve Herman is a veteran journalist and former White House bureau chief for Voice of America. During his international reporting career, he covered the White House, national security, diplomacy, politics, and major events across the United States and around the world.
Bill Bernardoni is the founder of Bernardoni Media & Marketing and an experienced radio and podcast producer, political communications professional, and broadcaster. He has produced nationally distributed programming for media organizations, public-policy groups, authors, journalists, and independent hosts.
About the Guests
Richard F. Hamm is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of History and Collins Fellow at the University at Albany, State University of New York. A leading historian of American Prohibition, he is the author of Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920.
Robert C. Post is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School and served as the school’s dean from 2009 to 2017. He is a constitutional-law scholar and the author of The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930.
Robert A. Mikos holds the LaRoche Family Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School and is a leading authority on federalism, marijuana law, and the relationship between state legalization policies and federal drug regulation.
Join the Conversation
When a federal prohibition remains on the books but states and much of the public have moved in another direction, should Washington continue enforcing the national rule—or formally return the decision to the states?
Share your thoughts with us at RadioFreeAmerica.media.