Welcome back to Cato Daily Podcast. This is Anastasia Glova on Monday, April 23rd.

Recently Cato Scholar Timothy Lynch testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism,

and Homeland Security on whether Congress should enact additional hate crimes legislation.

Lynch argued that in addition to being impractical, the proposed

hate crimes bill tramples over powers that are delegated to Congress.

You can read his testimony on the Cato website or you can listen

to this following podcast interview. What is the impetus for this latest

wave of hate crime legislation? Well there's no recent news event that is prompting the Congress to act to say that we need hate crimes

legislation because of this news event like the failure of a state government to prosecute

some awful crime.

It's really just the Democrats having wanted to expand hate crimes legislation.

They've been unable to do it in past years now that they control the Congress, they're moving this legislation forward.

You just testified in Congress against this legislation.

Are your objections based on constitutional grounds or do you just see this as an ineffectual policy?

I have both constitutional and policy objections to the legislation and so I advanced several

arguments to the Congressional Committee as to why this legislation should be

rejected. Okay let's focus on the constitutional objections first. Well the

constitutional objection is pretty basic. It's a reminder to the Congress that our Constitution creates a federal government of limited powers.

And the Tenth Amendment says that the powers that are not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states.

And crime fighting is a very important

governmental responsibility but is one of those powers that was reserved to

state governments. The federal government should not be involved in garden variety criminal offenses but even serious

...