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Page Number: 32

8 

BOND v. UNITED STATES 

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment 

and the act is meant as a menacing message, a small-time 
equivalent of leaving a severed horse head in the bed?  See 
ibid.  (using  the  “concerns”  driving  the  Convention—“acts
of  war,  assassination,  and  terrorism”—as  guideposts  of 
statutory meaning).  Moreover, the Court’s illogical embel-
lishment  seems  to  apply  only  to  the  “use”  of  a  chemical, 
ante, at 15, but “use” is only 1 of 11 kinds of activity that 
the  statute  prohibits.    What,  one  wonders,  makes  some-
thing a “chemical weapon” when it is merely “stockpile[d]” 
or “possess[ed]?”  To these questions and countless others, 
one guess is as bad as another.

No one should have to ponder the totality of the circum-
stances  in  order  to  determine  whether  his  conduct  is  a 
felony.  Yet that is what the Court will now require of all 
future handlers of harmful toxins—that is to say, all of us. 
Thanks to the Court’s revisions, the Act, which before was 
“[N]o
merely  broad,  is  now  broad  and  unintelligible. 
standard  of  conduct  is  specified  at  all.”    Coates  v.  Cincin­
nati,  402  U.  S.  611,  614  (1971).    Before  long,  I  suspect, 
courts will be required to say so. 

II.  The Constitutional Question 
Since  the  Act  is  clear,  the  real  question  this  case  pre-
sents  is  whether  the  Act  is  constitutional  as  applied  to
petitioner.  An unreasoned and citation-less sentence from 
our  opinion  in  Missouri  v.  Holland,  252  U. S.  416  (1920),
purported to furnish the answer: “If the treaty is valid”—
and no one argues that the Convention is not—“there can 
be no dispute about the validity of the statute under Arti-
cle  I,  §8,  as  a  necessary  and  proper  means  to  execute  the 
powers  of  the  Government.”  Id.,  at  432.4   Petitioner  and 

—————— 

4 Nineteen  years  earlier,  the  Court  embraced  a  similar  view—also 
without reasoning.  See Neely v. Henkel, 180 U. S. 109, 121 (1901) (“The
power  of  Congress  to  make  all  laws  necessary  and  proper  for  carrying
into execution . . . all [powers] vested in the Government of the United 
States . . . includes the power to enact such legislation as is appropriate