They are both rather broad powers that gives Congress a central power to pass laws in accordance to the constitution. It basically does as it says, lets Congress regulate trade and let congress pass laws needed at the time in accordance to the constitution.
Those two powers by themselves can be read to give congress such sweeping authority as to render the 10th amendment moot. It can quite reasonably be argued that the line the founders intended to draw in the 18th century is not the law that they would have intended to draw today, after all the key word, commerce, has been completely revolutionized since then. So no points for "plain meaning" here, and sorting out where the line ought to be is complicated and does a fantastic job of negating your original point, that the meaning of the constitution is "clear." For instance, does a commodity like corn (or marijuana) that is grown, sold and consumed all in one state effect interstate commerce and hence fall under federal purview? Well it certainly effects the price of that commodity not just locally, but internationally.
The Constitution provides several limits on the government's power collectively they form a right to privacy. There is no listed "right" of anonymity, but when the rest of the constitution is preserved, the ability to be anonymous is also preserved.
Your explanation already doesn't seem clear. Is my choice of birth control protected by constitutional guarantees of privacy? What about a woman's right to seek an abortion? Can I (a white man) marry a black woman? Have sex with a man? Were all of these things "clear" in the meaning of the constitution?
Then there's the minutia. What exactly is a "naturally born citizen?"
Someone born in the US or to people of US decent.
Really? So if a couple emigrated to China, lived there for decades, had a child there, raised him there, and he returned at age 30, he'd be eligible to be president at age 44? I don't think so. In reality "natural born citizen" is one of the most ill defined phrases in the entire document.
I think when it comes to the marriage issue we have to step back and really wonder why the hell the state is defining our relationships in the first place. And then determine that question later:P
I agree with the sentiment, but states have been recognizing and awarding benefits to marriage since before this nation's founding, and I don't think it's about to change any time soon. With that in mind, it seems "clear" to me that the full faith and credit clause mandates all states to recognize all marriages legally granted by any state, the federal defense of marriage act notwithstanding. On the other hand, I'm afraid I'm in the minority on that position, so maybe it isn't as "clear" as it ought to be.
(establishment) Can congress give money to a religiously run school? Can you have public prayer in public schools? How about moments of silence for religious reflection? Can a public school teach creationism? Is congress allowed to authorize the placement of a christian cross on public land? If they do, do they have to authorize the placement of a summum pyramid?
(free exercise) Can congress mandate that women aren't allowed to wear face-coverings in government jobs generally? What about jobs that require interaction with the public? What about jobs involving the use of heavy machinery? What about soldiers?
(press) Can congress force journalists to reveal their sources in testimony? Can congress forbit the publication of details sensitive to national security? Troop movements?
(assembly) Can congress mandate that your demonstration requires a permit? Can they give permits to some groups but not others? What kind of fee can be charged for a permit? How close to private property can I assemble? Can I obstruct through traffic? For how long?
(speech - my favorite) Can congress ban dangerous speech? Libelous speech? Obscene speech? Fraudulent speech? Deceptive commercial speech? Corporate political speech? The speech of members of the armed services? Speech carried over public airwaves? Speech in public schools? Is wearing a black armband speech? What about carrying a poster? Does the right of free speech extend to public areas of privately property?
I'm having an awful hard time figuring out what your beef with that quote is (it is a quote right?)
She doesn't say anything about limited or expansive government (here) and sentence one of the two sentence quote directly addresses your concern over tyranny.
The constitution is deliberately ambiguous on a number of extremely important points, because like all other political things the constitutional congress passed the buck on the hard issues of the day.
Do you really think that the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause are clear? Because if you do you'd be the only one.
Does the second amendment guarantee a individual or collective right to keep and bear arms? Does the constitution grant a right to privacy? What about anonymity? Can a state secede from the union? (I think this was a pretty big deal a while ago)
Then there's the minutia. What exactly is a "naturally born citizen?" On which side of the cruel and unusual line does prison overcrowding fall? Does full faith and credit mean that Utah has to recognize gay couples married in California?
I think that speaks more to the state of their system for handling classified information than their logic. If a wikileaks document somehow makes it into their repository, it could infect it, since you don't really know that it hasn't been doctored.
That such a document could make it into their repository is a much more concerning prospect.
Mostly, I think news organizations are still trying to get their heads around the massive document dump. But the collateral murder video definitely sparked debate about how we should be using force.
Besides, the wikileak angle is interesting, and it is news, I'm not going to begrudge anyone for talking about it. Similarly in the '70s the leak aspect of the pentagon papers was news and was covered, and until he outed himself figuring out who deepthroat was was a favorite past time of conspiracy theorists.
before someone gets all righteous on me - sometimes when dealing with immoral law, civil disobedience is warranted. Copyright is not one of those cases.
If you read Goldstein v. California you'll find that while congress is prohibited from granting unlimited copyrights (they can however extend them indefinitely... but that's another argument) there is no such bar to stop state legislatures from issuing unlimited copyright.
Ordinarily this would be a supremacy issue, but Congress is only authorized to grant copyrights, not mandated to, and in the area of pre-1972 audio recordings they deferred. This made an opening for state regulation, and they could do whatever they want. This also means that pre-1972 audio recording copyright law is different everywhere, so if you're dealing with any old recordings, find a good lawyer.
The summary and TFA are a little overblown. Works made between 1923 and 1972 might not enter the public domain in some states (probably California) before 2049 at the earliest, but it may already be in the public domain in other states. On the one hand, since New York was and still is a hub of the radio and entertainment industry they may have made a special provision for copyrighting audio recordings. On the other, it may be permissible to drive over the bridge to New Jersey and copy it there.
In fact a great deal of the reasoning in Goldstein v. California relies on the fact that pre-1972 audio recording copyright varies from state to state in order for it not to run afoul of the supremacy clause.
A large percentage of humans are altruistic. A small percentage aren't. It doesn't take that many people to look out for themselves for a strongman to install himself as leader. The history of society hasn't been campfires and kum-ba-ya - not withing groups, and certainly not between them.
If we could all just get along we wouldn't need government in the first place.
As for the difference between Africa and Western Civilization, a brief comparison of body counts quickly demonstrates that we're not the kinder gentler society.
Nah, that decision was based on the fact that IR scanning cameras aren't readily available, so the pubic reasonably expects that people can't see through their roofs. Google earth is different, and so are helicopters for that matter. You wouldn't have much of a chance getting a drug conviction thrown out because the cops spotted the marijuana plants in your backyard from a helicopter. It is unreasonable to think that your open backyard isn't in plain view of the public.
During the gilded age we were on specie backed currency. In fact, one of the biggest political battles of the era was for "free silver" and cost William Jennings Bryant the presidential election no less than 3 times, and he wasn't even arguing for fiat currency! He just wanted to change the specie.
As for corporations - what exactly is your beef? That the government protects investors? And how, exactly would the economy be better with less investment? Corporate personhood is a red herring, it's easy to get upset about the logic of it all, but it has little or no bearing on how business is actually conducted - and it certainly didn't in the 1880s. The only important debate surrounding corporate personhood is as to how far the constitutional protection of free speech extends, specifically are corporate campaign donations to political complains protected. In the gilded age with it's machine politics, and virtually no campaign finance rules it was a complete non-issue.
Of course I'm willing to assume some risk and not others. That's what living in the real world is all about. And yes, the level of intrusion absolutely plays a role in what I'm willing to accept, which is why I'm not comfortable letting the government mandate my birth control method of choice, but I am ok taking my vehicle through an emissions check.
Your property is not your body. The pool you build in your yard does not reflect your sperm count.
You may choose to build a bunker because you don't trust your neighbor, but we, as society, have chosen to enforce certain building regulations so that whole cities don't burn down. Experience has shown that many people will choose cheap and dangerous over expensive and safe any day of the week, and that when a critical mass of people choose based on frugality there are very real public safety risks to everyone. To avoid this we need minimum building standards, and they need to be enforced.
What is mildly amusing is that we've tried the libertarian Utopian, and it was called the gilded age. Gilded because there was a little bit of opulence covering a mass of shit. Given the opportunity your neighbor will enrich himself without considering what impact it has on you. Sometimes you might be able to claim damages, like when he dumps his sewage onto your land, other times you can't, like when he builds slummy apartments right up to the edge of your property. We, as society, have chosen to forbid people from making certain private property decisions that damage other people. Is there a balance between freedom to act and freedom from undeserved harm? Yeah, but such is life.
Besides, I have a hard time believing that you're opposed to all government mandated inspection. Do you really have a problem with mandatory immunization for school children? I can assure you that the lack of mumps outbreaks isn't imaginary security, and I can also assure you that without mandates herd immunity will suffer. Are you really opposed to the FDA inspecting your meat? Yeah, it's an affront to the property rights of the slaughterhouse operator, but food safety isn't an imaginary security - and no, we won't ever know which operators are safe and which aren't.
Really? That's the solution? This is why I never understood the Ron Paul crowd.
Here's the deal. If my neighbor built such a shitty pool that it couldn't pass inspection I know he can't cover the cost of damage to my property. So I make an insurance claim, and who pays for that? EVERYONE.
Let's make it real simple. There is a social aspect to risk, therefore there is a social responsibility to mitigate risk, which is why building permits isn't a great intrusion into your property rights, it's common sense.
There's dozens of things that could be wrong with your pool that you didn't think to check, that's the point of building permits, to remind you that there are rules before the pool is built. An engineer can look at a plan and sign off on it without having to visit the site. After the pool is built how is he going to know what concrete was used?
Yes, an important part of this is revenue generation for the city. Yes, the big brother aspects of what this city is doing makes me uncomfortable. But there's nothing wrong with requiring building permits, and there's nothing wrong with penalizing people who flaunted the rule and got found out later. At any rate, they won't be able to sell their house until their pool is inspected anyway (which is how the city ought to deal with this problem - not by firing up google earth.)
A deed restriction tells you what kind of mailbox you need and what color to paint your front door, or in the past that colored people and china-men aren't allowed to inhabit the premises unless employed in domestic service. That last one's a direct quote from the deed to my grandfather's house.
It's city ordinances that tell you that you can't have a chicken coop in downtown St. Louis, and that you can't run a junkyard from the 1/8 acre behind your McMansion, and it always has been.
Deed restrictions don't say, "make sure you get a building permit before you build your deck, or your garage, or your pool." The reason we have building permits is so that urban Mr. Fix'it doesn't build a deck that collapses at a party injuring dozens, so that he doesn't build a garage that catches fire and spreads to the neighborhood, and so that the pool isn't a hole in the ground attached to a sensitive wetland into which Suzi Homeowner diligently dumps a 20lb bag of chlorine a week.
All that said, while having actual engineers sign off on actual building projects is a good idea (and don't kid yourself, that pool is a building project), this is a money grab, pure and simple.
First, it's a really bad idea to think that geographical location has anything to do with evolution. Second, the history of human society has been away from migratory behaviors. Third, there's virtually no place on earth where you can move to prevent a disaster striking. And finally, even if there were a place immune from disaster, if large groups of people start migrating because they're hungry or because they think they're about to be hungry, that's going to have catastrophic consequences for the places they more to.
Humans already have so much food they don't know what to do with it all, and we've had more food than we could eat since sometime around 1890. The reason people go hungry has nothing to do with our ability to feed them and everything to do with corruption, transportation, and economics (usually in that order).
So yeah, there will be plenty of food in the Yukon - which is great for the 34,000 people who live there, the question is what do you do with the populations that grew up around what used to be fertile plains and that will likely become expanding deserts?
It gets even more interesting than that. There's two main types of drag, friction drag and pressure drag. Friction drag is generated from air molecules slamming into the object and the fact that very close to the surface of the object the fluid is slowed (known as the no-slip condition). Pressure drag is a bit less intuitive, but it's what makes drafting work in both nascar and cycling. As you speed up an area of low pressure develops behind you as the flow separates at the back of the object. This low pressure literally sucks you backwards. Finally there is a discontinuity in drag at mach 1 when shock waves and the like develop.
At low speeds friction drag tends to dominate and this drag can be reduced by improving the aerodynamics of the leading edge of the object. At high speeds pressure drag tends to dominate and this can be reduced by modifying the trailing end of the object - which why time-trial racing bike helmets are pointed at the back. The other thing you can do is add texture which separates the flow from the object and usually reduces the size of the low pressure bubble behind it, and this is why golf balls are stippled.
One last interesting bit. The angle the shockwave of a supersonic object takes is a function of speed, not shape. If you're a plane designer you want the largest wing area as possible within that shock wave (things projecting into the shock have a nasty tenancy to be ripped off.) So while the top speed of the SR-71 is still technically classified (or at least it was when I took fluid dynamics), by measuring the angle from the nose to the wingtips you can calculate the top design speed remarkably easily.
I think you're right about the meaning of the law, but who knows which way it would go if it were ever brought to court. On the one hand the language of the statute is clear-ish. On the other, Congress and the library of congress have clearly recognized the need for certain exceptions to the anti-circumvention rule, and it's completely unreasonable for every film professor and cell phone wielder to crack the DRM on their own.
It's sort of like legalizing the possession of marijuana but not the growing, sale, or transport. It could be done, but one law is totally incompatible with the other. A court could let it stand despite the affront to common sense it poses, or they could thumb their noses at the legislature (who deserve it).
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Those two powers by themselves can be read to give congress such sweeping authority as to render the 10th amendment moot. It can quite reasonably be argued that the line the founders intended to draw in the 18th century is not the law that they would have intended to draw today, after all the key word, commerce, has been completely revolutionized since then. So no points for "plain meaning" here, and sorting out where the line ought to be is complicated and does a fantastic job of negating your original point, that the meaning of the constitution is "clear." For instance, does a commodity like corn (or marijuana) that is grown, sold and consumed all in one state effect interstate commerce and hence fall under federal purview? Well it certainly effects the price of that commodity not just locally, but internationally.
Your explanation already doesn't seem clear. Is my choice of birth control protected by constitutional guarantees of privacy? What about a woman's right to seek an abortion? Can I (a white man) marry a black woman? Have sex with a man? Were all of these things "clear" in the meaning of the constitution?
Really? So if a couple emigrated to China, lived there for decades, had a child there, raised him there, and he returned at age 30, he'd be eligible to be president at age 44? I don't think so. In reality "natural born citizen" is one of the most ill defined phrases in the entire document.
I agree with the sentiment, but states have been recognizing and awarding benefits to marriage since before this nation's founding, and I don't think it's about to change any time soon. With that in mind, it seems "clear" to me that the full faith and credit clause mandates all states to recognize all marriages legally granted by any state, the federal defense of marriage act notwithstanding. On the other hand, I'm afraid I'm in the minority on that position, so maybe it isn't as "clear" as it ought to be.
Yeah?
(establishment)
Can congress give money to a religiously run school?
Can you have public prayer in public schools? How about moments of silence for religious reflection?
Can a public school teach creationism?
Is congress allowed to authorize the placement of a christian cross on public land? If they do, do they have to authorize the placement of a summum pyramid?
(free exercise)
Can congress mandate that women aren't allowed to wear face-coverings in government jobs generally? What about jobs that require interaction with the public? What about jobs involving the use of heavy machinery? What about soldiers?
(press)
Can congress force journalists to reveal their sources in testimony?
Can congress forbit the publication of details sensitive to national security? Troop movements?
(assembly)
Can congress mandate that your demonstration requires a permit?
Can they give permits to some groups but not others?
What kind of fee can be charged for a permit?
How close to private property can I assemble?
Can I obstruct through traffic? For how long?
(speech - my favorite)
Can congress ban dangerous speech?
Libelous speech?
Obscene speech?
Fraudulent speech?
Deceptive commercial speech?
Corporate political speech?
The speech of members of the armed services?
Speech carried over public airwaves?
Speech in public schools?
Is wearing a black armband speech? What about carrying a poster?
Does the right of free speech extend to public areas of privately property?
Hey - what's that thing called that a judge/justice issues that explains how they decided a case before them?
I'm having an awful hard time figuring out what your beef with that quote is (it is a quote right?)
She doesn't say anything about limited or expansive government (here) and sentence one of the two sentence quote directly addresses your concern over tyranny.
Right...
The constitution is deliberately ambiguous on a number of extremely important points, because like all other political things the constitutional congress passed the buck on the hard issues of the day.
Do you really think that the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause are clear? Because if you do you'd be the only one.
Does the second amendment guarantee a individual or collective right to keep and bear arms?
Does the constitution grant a right to privacy? What about anonymity?
Can a state secede from the union? (I think this was a pretty big deal a while ago)
Then there's the minutia. What exactly is a "naturally born citizen?"
On which side of the cruel and unusual line does prison overcrowding fall?
Does full faith and credit mean that Utah has to recognize gay couples married in California?
When you sent your damn puritans over here.
PBR is what passed for good beer in 1893. (hence the blue ribbon)
That said, it's still better than most mega breweries' swill.
I think that speaks more to the state of their system for handling classified information than their logic. If a wikileaks document somehow makes it into their repository, it could infect it, since you don't really know that it hasn't been doctored.
That such a document could make it into their repository is a much more concerning prospect.
eh I don't think that's the case.
Mostly, I think news organizations are still trying to get their heads around the massive document dump. But the collateral murder video definitely sparked debate about how we should be using force.
Besides, the wikileak angle is interesting, and it is news, I'm not going to begrudge anyone for talking about it. Similarly in the '70s the leak aspect of the pentagon papers was news and was covered, and until he outed himself figuring out who deepthroat was was a favorite past time of conspiracy theorists.
before someone gets all righteous on me - sometimes when dealing with immoral law, civil disobedience is warranted. Copyright is not one of those cases.
The founders started the constitution with "We the people...", not "but I wanna."
Its a society, and sometimes that means living with rules you don't particularly like.
If you read Goldstein v. California you'll find that while congress is prohibited from granting unlimited copyrights (they can however extend them indefinitely... but that's another argument) there is no such bar to stop state legislatures from issuing unlimited copyright.
Ordinarily this would be a supremacy issue, but Congress is only authorized to grant copyrights, not mandated to, and in the area of pre-1972 audio recordings they deferred. This made an opening for state regulation, and they could do whatever they want. This also means that pre-1972 audio recording copyright law is different everywhere, so if you're dealing with any old recordings, find a good lawyer.
Check with a copyright attorney.
The summary and TFA are a little overblown. Works made between 1923 and 1972 might not enter the public domain in some states (probably California) before 2049 at the earliest, but it may already be in the public domain in other states. On the one hand, since New York was and still is a hub of the radio and entertainment industry they may have made a special provision for copyrighting audio recordings. On the other, it may be permissible to drive over the bridge to New Jersey and copy it there.
In fact a great deal of the reasoning in Goldstein v. California relies on the fact that pre-1972 audio recording copyright varies from state to state in order for it not to run afoul of the supremacy clause.
A large percentage of humans are altruistic. A small percentage aren't. It doesn't take that many people to look out for themselves for a strongman to install himself as leader. The history of society hasn't been campfires and kum-ba-ya - not withing groups, and certainly not between them.
If we could all just get along we wouldn't need government in the first place.
As for the difference between Africa and Western Civilization, a brief comparison of body counts quickly demonstrates that we're not the kinder gentler society.
The only think the house has to watch out for is angry gamblers burning the casino to the ground.
Nah, that decision was based on the fact that IR scanning cameras aren't readily available, so the pubic reasonably expects that people can't see through their roofs. Google earth is different, and so are helicopters for that matter. You wouldn't have much of a chance getting a drug conviction thrown out because the cops spotted the marijuana plants in your backyard from a helicopter. It is unreasonable to think that your open backyard isn't in plain view of the public.
During the gilded age we were on specie backed currency. In fact, one of the biggest political battles of the era was for "free silver" and cost William Jennings Bryant the presidential election no less than 3 times, and he wasn't even arguing for fiat currency! He just wanted to change the specie.
As for corporations - what exactly is your beef? That the government protects investors? And how, exactly would the economy be better with less investment? Corporate personhood is a red herring, it's easy to get upset about the logic of it all, but it has little or no bearing on how business is actually conducted - and it certainly didn't in the 1880s. The only important debate surrounding corporate personhood is as to how far the constitutional protection of free speech extends, specifically are corporate campaign donations to political complains protected. In the gilded age with it's machine politics, and virtually no campaign finance rules it was a complete non-issue.
Of course I'm willing to assume some risk and not others. That's what living in the real world is all about. And yes, the level of intrusion absolutely plays a role in what I'm willing to accept, which is why I'm not comfortable letting the government mandate my birth control method of choice, but I am ok taking my vehicle through an emissions check.
Your property is not your body. The pool you build in your yard does not reflect your sperm count.
You may choose to build a bunker because you don't trust your neighbor, but we, as society, have chosen to enforce certain building regulations so that whole cities don't burn down. Experience has shown that many people will choose cheap and dangerous over expensive and safe any day of the week, and that when a critical mass of people choose based on frugality there are very real public safety risks to everyone. To avoid this we need minimum building standards, and they need to be enforced.
What is mildly amusing is that we've tried the libertarian Utopian, and it was called the gilded age. Gilded because there was a little bit of opulence covering a mass of shit. Given the opportunity your neighbor will enrich himself without considering what impact it has on you. Sometimes you might be able to claim damages, like when he dumps his sewage onto your land, other times you can't, like when he builds slummy apartments right up to the edge of your property. We, as society, have chosen to forbid people from making certain private property decisions that damage other people. Is there a balance between freedom to act and freedom from undeserved harm? Yeah, but such is life.
Besides, I have a hard time believing that you're opposed to all government mandated inspection. Do you really have a problem with mandatory immunization for school children? I can assure you that the lack of mumps outbreaks isn't imaginary security, and I can also assure you that without mandates herd immunity will suffer. Are you really opposed to the FDA inspecting your meat? Yeah, it's an affront to the property rights of the slaughterhouse operator, but food safety isn't an imaginary security - and no, we won't ever know which operators are safe and which aren't.
Really? That's the solution? This is why I never understood the Ron Paul crowd.
Here's the deal. If my neighbor built such a shitty pool that it couldn't pass inspection I know he can't cover the cost of damage to my property. So I make an insurance claim, and who pays for that? EVERYONE.
Let's make it real simple. There is a social aspect to risk, therefore there is a social responsibility to mitigate risk, which is why building permits isn't a great intrusion into your property rights, it's common sense.
There's dozens of things that could be wrong with your pool that you didn't think to check, that's the point of building permits, to remind you that there are rules before the pool is built. An engineer can look at a plan and sign off on it without having to visit the site. After the pool is built how is he going to know what concrete was used?
Yes, an important part of this is revenue generation for the city. Yes, the big brother aspects of what this city is doing makes me uncomfortable. But there's nothing wrong with requiring building permits, and there's nothing wrong with penalizing people who flaunted the rule and got found out later. At any rate, they won't be able to sell their house until their pool is inspected anyway (which is how the city ought to deal with this problem - not by firing up google earth.)
A deed restriction tells you what kind of mailbox you need and what color to paint your front door, or in the past that colored people and china-men aren't allowed to inhabit the premises unless employed in domestic service. That last one's a direct quote from the deed to my grandfather's house.
It's city ordinances that tell you that you can't have a chicken coop in downtown St. Louis, and that you can't run a junkyard from the 1/8 acre behind your McMansion, and it always has been.
Deed restrictions don't say, "make sure you get a building permit before you build your deck, or your garage, or your pool." The reason we have building permits is so that urban Mr. Fix'it doesn't build a deck that collapses at a party injuring dozens, so that he doesn't build a garage that catches fire and spreads to the neighborhood, and so that the pool isn't a hole in the ground attached to a sensitive wetland into which Suzi Homeowner diligently dumps a 20lb bag of chlorine a week.
All that said, while having actual engineers sign off on actual building projects is a good idea (and don't kid yourself, that pool is a building project), this is a money grab, pure and simple.
First, it's a really bad idea to think that geographical location has anything to do with evolution. Second, the history of human society has been away from migratory behaviors. Third, there's virtually no place on earth where you can move to prevent a disaster striking. And finally, even if there were a place immune from disaster, if large groups of people start migrating because they're hungry or because they think they're about to be hungry, that's going to have catastrophic consequences for the places they more to.
Humans already have so much food they don't know what to do with it all, and we've had more food than we could eat since sometime around 1890. The reason people go hungry has nothing to do with our ability to feed them and everything to do with corruption, transportation, and economics (usually in that order).
So yeah, there will be plenty of food in the Yukon - which is great for the 34,000 people who live there, the question is what do you do with the populations that grew up around what used to be fertile plains and that will likely become expanding deserts?
It gets even more interesting than that. There's two main types of drag, friction drag and pressure drag. Friction drag is generated from air molecules slamming into the object and the fact that very close to the surface of the object the fluid is slowed (known as the no-slip condition). Pressure drag is a bit less intuitive, but it's what makes drafting work in both nascar and cycling. As you speed up an area of low pressure develops behind you as the flow separates at the back of the object. This low pressure literally sucks you backwards. Finally there is a discontinuity in drag at mach 1 when shock waves and the like develop.
At low speeds friction drag tends to dominate and this drag can be reduced by improving the aerodynamics of the leading edge of the object. At high speeds pressure drag tends to dominate and this can be reduced by modifying the trailing end of the object - which why time-trial racing bike helmets are pointed at the back. The other thing you can do is add texture which separates the flow from the object and usually reduces the size of the low pressure bubble behind it, and this is why golf balls are stippled.
One last interesting bit. The angle the shockwave of a supersonic object takes is a function of speed, not shape. If you're a plane designer you want the largest wing area as possible within that shock wave (things projecting into the shock have a nasty tenancy to be ripped off.) So while the top speed of the SR-71 is still technically classified (or at least it was when I took fluid dynamics), by measuring the angle from the nose to the wingtips you can calculate the top design speed remarkably easily.
I think you're right about the meaning of the law, but who knows which way it would go if it were ever brought to court. On the one hand the language of the statute is clear-ish. On the other, Congress and the library of congress have clearly recognized the need for certain exceptions to the anti-circumvention rule, and it's completely unreasonable for every film professor and cell phone wielder to crack the DRM on their own.
It's sort of like legalizing the possession of marijuana but not the growing, sale, or transport. It could be done, but one law is totally incompatible with the other. A court could let it stand despite the affront to common sense it poses, or they could thumb their noses at the legislature (who deserve it).