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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your host, Nia Rogers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, political science professor.
N. Rodgers: Good morning, Aughie?
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I am excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm doing fine. One of the reasons why I am doing fine is listeners, we once again are continuing our series, looking at little known, often forgotten, occasionally misunderstood clauses of the US Constitution. This one's got a really long title; full faith and credit clause. It's not even easily abbreviated. The FFCC. I've never heard it.
N. Rodgers: I know. It doesn't sound as good as emoluments.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Emoluments has a nice sound to it.
J. Aughenbaugh: We were fond of saying that particular clause. See our previous episode in this series. But Nia, what is the full faith and credit clause?
N. Rodgers: I'm not entirely certain. If I'm understanding correctly, say that I am found in a judgment in civil court in the State of Virginia that I owe, I don't know, let's say $1,800 to Virginia for back taxes, and I go to tax court and they find that. I say, "Then I'll just move to Florida and I won't pay you." First of all, don't move to Florida. But second of all, I think that it means that Virginia can show up at my door in Florida and say, "Hi there. We'd like to repossess whatever you have that's worth $1,800 so that we can get our money back," or whatever. Doesn't it mean that one state will recognize the judgments of another state? Does it also hold true with criminal things, if I'm a serial killer in Virginia and I move to Florida? No, that's extradition. That's a different thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's a extradition. That's a different thing. Listeners, the full faith and credit clause, I'm going to go ahead and give the long-winded spiel, and then we're going to give examples which really highlight this. The full faith and credit clause requires states to respect the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. What this does is ensure that court judgments, legal contracts, and official statuses remain valid across state lines.
N. Rodgers: This is all civil matters? These are not criminal matters.
J. Aughenbaugh: Civil, family courts, business, etc. Let me give you an example. Let's say, Nia, you and I create a business that gets incorporated in Virginia. After a couple of years, you conclude that working with me as a business partner is pretty much akin to root canal without the local.
N. Rodgers: Seems extreme, but okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're like, "I don't want to go through the burdensome process of breaking up our partnership, so I'm just going to move to North Carolina. See, Aughie, if you can go ahead and force me to honor my obligations in our business contract." Because Virginia has officially recognized us as a business, if I went to Virginia civil court and swore out a complaint that you're not honoring the contract, I could then force North Carolina courts to require you to comply with your outstanding obligations per our business contract.
N. Rodgers: If I refused, would I be held in contempt of North Carolina courts or Virginia courts?
J. Aughenbaugh: Virginia courts, but I would get an order from a Virginia court to force the North Carolina court to haul your butt in front of them and to explain why you don't have to comply with the Virginia court order.
N. Rodgers: This is why when people get divorced and they have fights over their kids, if you hare off with your kid and go to another state, those officers will come and find that child and return it to the custodial parent.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because you can't just say, "I lost, so now I'm bailing." That's basically what that's about.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You can't be a sore loser. You can't just choose to "then I'm going to just start over someplace else."
J. Aughenbaugh: It is found in Article 4, Section 1 of the US Constitution. Again, it basically prevents people from escaping legal duties because they moved.
N. Rodgers: See y'all.
J. Aughenbaugh: The idea behind this was one of the core defects of the Articles of Confederation. Was that states frequently were in competition with one another and the framers thought, one of the ways we could bind those, oftentimes conflicting, disagreeable states is by requiring each state to honor to give full faith and credit to the contracts and legal obligations of the other states.
N. Rodgers: We did a couple of negative examples, but I'm going to ask you about a potential positive example. Let us say that marriage between librarians and political science professors are illegal in Virginia, but they're legal in North Carolina. You and I go over the border and we get married, which would, by the way, be a complete disaster, listeners, because Aughie doesn't have that kind of patience. But let's just pretend that happens, then Virginia has to recognize that marriage license because it's legal in North Carolina.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: This is a good thing that can happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: But in the example you just gave Nia, what the federal courts have held is a state does not have to honor an out-of-state ruling if the original court did not have proper legal authority or justification, or states may refuse enforcement if a law from another state violates their own deeply-rooted public policies. This is known as the public policy exception. I'm going to give you an example. Nia, do we have a state that will recognize and allow brothels to be incorporated as businesses?
N. Rodgers: Nevada.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Nevada does. However, are there other states that perhaps don't want to recognize or allow brothels within their jurisdictions?
N. Rodgers: The other 49.
J. Aughenbaugh: Pretty much the other 49.
N. Rodgers: I could name them all, but that would take us a while.
J. Aughenbaugh: Do those other 49 states have to allow a brothel, for instance, that has been incorporated in Nevada to have a brothel franchise in the other 49 states? No.
N. Rodgers: I see where that gets complicated.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: What I was thinking about was loving Virginia. I was thinking about the idea that they went to Maryland and got married because it was legal for them to get married in Maryland. Virginia had a call when they came back here and were like, "No, we cannot have a mixed race marriage." This is the end of the world, as we know it. Stupid Virginia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Virginia actually argued in front of the US Supreme Court that because of Supreme Court precedent, they did not have to comply with the full faith and credit clause because Maryland had gone ahead and recognized the union between the lovings. The Supreme Court said that's all fine and true. However, you not allowing interracial couples to marry or to recognize their marriage from another state violates a different part of the US Constitution, known as the equal protection clause. But to give you an example, listeners, before the Supreme Court issued Obergefell v. Hodges, were there states that allowed same sex couples to get married? Yes.
N. Rodgers: California, Oregon.
J. Aughenbaugh: I think at the time of Obergefell v. Hodges, 10 or 11 states allowed same sex marriages. But the other states, based on the public policy exception to the full faith and credit clause, said this violates deeply-rooted public policy restrictions on same sex marriages in our states, and they would not recognize those marriages. They would not recognize them.
N. Rodgers: At that point, the Supremes take up the case in part because it's unevenly filed across the United States. If you have a bunch of states that are doing it and a bunch of states that aren't doing it, then it becomes problematic for couples. My job is moving us to Oklahoma and they don't recognize. What happens to us? I can see why cases would need to be decided before the Supremes if it were causing wildly uneven execution of the law. Nevada's one place where you can have a brothel. But if all of a sudden other states started to say, "Hey, brothel seemed a good idea," and there were 10 or 12 states that allowed legal brothels, then does that go to the Supreme Court for a brothel decision?
J. Aughenbaugh: At that point, what's the argument Nevada is going to make? We want to have the exclusive monopoly on brothels?
N. Rodgers: No, I guess you wouldn't recognize a brothel. Never mind. That doesn't work quite the same as a marriage, where you would need to recognize the marriage in order for people to continue to have the benefits that they had in the previous state where they were married. I see.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because if other states all of a sudden said that brothel business idea seems like the way to go, we know that some of our citizens would prefer to have sex at brothels.
N. Rodgers: Especially if they were checked out by the health department.
J. Aughenbaugh: We could tax them.
N. Rodgers: They're very regulated in Nevada.
J. Aughenbaugh: We can tax them, and thus make money. What's Nevada going to go ahead and say, "No, we've cornered the market."
N. Rodgers: On legal brothels. I see. It's really more about individuals being held to account than it is businesses being held to account?
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, remember the purpose. It was to force states to work with and cooperate with one another. Because in the Articles of Confederation, you had individual states with different currency. You had some states who were like, "Yes." In Maryland, you can have this kind of contract. We don't require that here in Virginia, so we won't recognize the contract in Maryland. You had all of these differences which made it almost impossible to create a national economy.
J. Aughenbaugh: You had people who were just walking out of business contracts, marriages, family responsibilities, and they could do so simply by doing what? Moving.
N. Rodgers: Which was a big deal because you had to pick up all your stuff and go somewhere else.
J. Aughenbaugh: Do understand that the full faith and credit clause does not apply to congressional or federal government. Public acts. A good example of this was in 1813 in the case of Mills v. Duryee. The question that arose was, did a judgment of a New York court apply in the District of Columbia? Justice Joseph Story wrote that because the District of Columbia is a federal property, that a judgment in a New York court does not necessarily apply to the District of Columbia. Remember, it's states recognizing other states. Yes. The public policy exception was first recognized in 1939, with the case of Pacific Employers Insurance versus industrial accident. I'm not going to go into the details. But that was the case where the Supreme Court clearly recognized the public policy exception. The court continues to use it. They use it as recently as 2003. Again, I put in my research notes. The classic example is brothels. Just because Nevada allows them and recognizes them legally does not mean that the other states have to allow brothels. All I keep on thinking about the brothels.
N. Rodgers: The franchise.
J. Aughenbaugh: The franchising.
N. Rodgers: McBrothels.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I'd like to open a string of McBrothels. I wish that because that public policy exception seems like a loophole.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That probably some states walk through when they shouldn't be allowed to.
J. Aughenbaugh: The public policy exception, and I'm sorry, listeners, if you've heard us discuss this before, is rooted in British common law, particularly public health and safety. Which is the foundation of a lot of state government power. This is known as the police power. Just because, for instance, one state says you can't go ahead and do X doesn't mean that every other state has to have the same conception of public health and safety. But I'm with you. We saw this pretty clearly with same sex marriage. At some point in time, beyond not treating same sex couples equally under the law. Many of us suspected that the Supreme Court was going to have to provide some countrywide policy simply because you could not have potentially 50 different regimes in regards to marriage. But what many Americans don't understand is that the federal government has no authority in regards to marriage. There's no clause in the US Constitution.
N. Rodgers: It's not federal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, the Congress can go ahead and regulate marriage. Marriage is a state government institution. Could theoretically tomorrow Nia, a state go ahead and pass a state law or an amendment to their state constitution and say we're no longer in that marriage business. Theoretically, the answer is yes.
N. Rodgers: I think what they could do is say, we're not going to have any marriage. I don't know if they could say, We're not going to have same-sex marriage.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, that is correct. That is an important distinction, but they could get rid of the institution for all.
N. Rodgers: Marriage, totally. That would be something.
J. Aughenbaugh: However, they would still, per the full faith and credit clause, have to recognize out of state marriages unless they could demonstrate in federal court that they have some public health and safety, some public policy.
N. Rodgers: Justify. Pretend for just a moment that Virginia bans, we're just not in the marriage business anymore. Everybody who's in Virginia, suddenly they find that their marriages are not recognized by the state. They mass exodus to the various states around us, get married, come back to Virginia to their homes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Virginia has to recognize their marriages. That's why that thing doesn't happen. Because the people will just go get married somewhere else and then say, now you have to recognize my marriage anyway.
N. Rodgers: If the state of Texas says we are not going to naturalize anymore citizens, period end of story. But those people can naturalize.
J. Aughenbaugh: But that's not a real.
N. Rodgers: That's a federal thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: But what if Texas went ahead and said, We are no longer going to allow companies to sell tires in Texas? I don't know why they would do that. We're no longer going to recognize businesses that want to sell tires in Texas. Does that mean the other 49 states have to agree with Texas?
J. Aughenbaugh: Hell, no.
N. Rodgers: Arizona sell you tires?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Oklahoma sell you tires, Arkansas sell you tires.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'll just go across the border to Louisiana get myself four new tires. Texas, you're going to have to recognize that I made that purchase. A lot of these listeners, a lot of the applications of the Full Faith and Credit Clause occur in regards to family law.
N. Rodgers: That makes sense. You can't get out of paying child support because you moved to another state.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because if that were the case, there are a lot of people not a lot. I don't know how many people, but there are people who would choose to do that, who choose not to support their children if they could bail and get away with it.
J. Aughenbaugh: We've already discussed interracial marriage, and before the Supreme Court's loving decision, the Full Faith, and Credit Clause was typically viewed as the exception. The public policy exception was used to allow states to not recognize interracial marriages that were entered into in other states. We've already talked about same sex marriage. Again, the public policy exception was used to avoid the scope of the Full Faith and Credit Clause. but the full faith and credit Clause applies to things like adoption. Think about it.
N. Rodgers: That's a contract.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is a contract.
N. Rodgers: It's a contract with the state. You're basically saying, I will care for this child and I will love it and raise it and do whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Awesome.
N. Rodgers: Other people have to recognize that you've adopted a child and the child is yours.
J. Aughenbaugh: And there are different regimes. What many people don't recognize who have never gone through the adoption process, the states have different laws in regards to what you must do to adopt a child that was born in that state. For instance, Nia, what if a couple in Kentucky wants to adopt a child that was born in West Virginia? The full faith and credit clause would require Kentucky to recognize the adoption in West Virginia.
N. Rodgers: If the adoption rules in West Virginia said that you have to have three home visits before you can adopt this child, Kentucky would need to perform three home visits.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Before that child could come to live in that home because that's the West Virginia rule to make sure safety for the child.
J. Aughenbaugh: In a West Virginia court could then go ahead and reject the adoption if Kentucky did not enforce that requirement, yes?
N. Rodgers: That would suck. Almost you get your heart set on. You've met the kid. They've met you. Everybody loves everybody, and they want to be together, and you can't do it states is stupid.
J. Aughenbaugh: You see this a lot with family law. You see this a lot with business judgments.
N. Rodgers: You and I have a business, and we owe a lot of money. I moved to Hawaii because I don't want to pay all the money.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Hawaii can garnish my wages and give them to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: To pay off our debts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Let's just say, for instance, I hire you Nia because you run some business, and I need your services, and you provide the service.
N. Rodgers: I come to fix your shower head. I fix your shower head. I'll do the best possible job.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then I attempt you to give back some of the payment or to come back in and redo the work. You're like I'm not going to do that, so I'm just going to go ahead and disembark to South Carolina.
N. Rodgers: Someone to deliver Alaska.
J. Aughenbaugh: I always want to live Alaska. If you did that with enough people, we will go to Small Claims Court in Virginia and get that court to swear out a judgment against you. If we can find that you've now moved to Alaska.
N. Rodgers: Making a killing in the oil fields. We're going to want our money back.
J. Aughenbaugh: We can ask an Alaska court to honor what the Virginia Small Claims Court decreed in regards to your non performance of contracted services.
N. Rodgers: Generally, the other state will comply?
J. Aughenbaugh: They will comply, but think about what I just described. First of all, I would probably have to hire a private investigator to find out where you moved to.
N. Rodgers: It's not like I'm going to leave you a forwarding address. If I'm going to be a jerk, I'm going to go all the way. I'm just going to disappear one night.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then my lawyer who's probably not admitted to the Alaska State bar is going to have to find an Alaska lawyer to work with.
N. Rodgers: To work with.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's a lot to go through. But theoretically, I could. If enough of your customers were mistreated by you, we might band together and go after you. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Not to sell. Don't leave.
J. Aughenbaugh: But that's the full faith and credit Clause. I love giving these examples in class because a lot of my students are like, you mean to tell me that I just can't pick up and go to another state and leave all that behind? I'm like, not according to the full faith and credit Clause. You can't.
N. Rodgers: Really where this might affect more of our listeners, perhaps, and I'm sad if it's true. But if you are evicted from someplace that can follow you to other states.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That's a contractual arrangement. A lot of people view it as this is housing.
N. Rodgers: But when you sign a lease, you're signing a contract that says, I promise to pay you for 12 months, this amount of money or however many months, this amount of money each month. When you don't do that, and you just get up and leave in the middle of the night, the landlord can come for you. I guess it's probably different if they evict you. If they evict you, they probably can't pass you down for it.
J. Aughenbaugh: If they've evicted you, they've already gone to a court. If they get a court order that evicts you and you're like fine, I'm not going to pay back rent.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, the eviction notice will also have to be honored by the other state as grounds for why that other state can enter a judgment that you have to repay your debt in another state.
N. Rodgers: So they could still garnish your wages or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Here's the other thing, listeners, about the full faith and credit clause. If you think that if you just move to another state, you can avoid your contractual problems from your previous state, well, if you don't show up to contest a claim made against you in your previous home state.
N. Rodgers: I don't fly back from Alaska to Virginia to argue with you about the shower head.
J. Aughenbaugh: Shower head, that judgment can be entered against you, and you might not even know that there was a judgment entered against you.
N. Rodgers: So there's no obligation to hunt me down and tell me that there's a.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, no, the point I was trying to make is, if you leave, a court proceeding can still occur in your previous home state, and once that judgment gets issued, then it can be transferred to or applied to your now new home state. Again, simply leaving does not resolve your obligations.
N. Rodgers: Well, similarly, they find people guilty in abstentia all the time.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, in criminal court, yes.
N. Rodgers: If you don't show up.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Right.
N. Rodgers: They're like, well, we're just going to assume that you're saying you're guilty because you didn't put up a defense.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I get why the founders did this because they were trying not to have 13 grumbly independent colonies, or the other thing too is, if you were a state that was super slick, you could say, we're not going to recognize any of the other judgments from it, come here and you can start a new life completely new. You will have no previous debt because we won't recognize that from another state. I could see why the feds are like, no, let's not do that. That seems like a terrible idea.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, actually stumbled across something that I found in my research, and I didn't put in the research notes. But listeners, think about the early years of the United States as a country, we had Western states. Now, they're not Western by today's standards, they were actually still East of the Mississippi.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, if you were a business person, say, in Philadelphia or New York, and your businesses went South.
N. Rodgers: You owe a bunch of money to people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. You're thinking, I can just go ahead and move to Tennessee, or West Virginia, or Kentucky, or Southwest Ohio, they're not going to find me there. Some of those states actually advertise themselves as places where you can go and start fresh, start new. Well, that's all fine and dandy, but you can't run an economy like that because if nobody's honoring their obligations. Who in their right mind is going to go ahead and create a business, or go into a partnership, or sell [inaudible] surface, if they know that the other person in the contract can just bail.
N. Rodgers: Can just bail. Can not turn up one day and all of a sudden they're in Ohio, and you're like, wait, what?
J. Aughenbaugh: What?
N. Rodgers: What just happened?
J. Aughenbaugh: The Framers in many ways understood that there has to be limits to freedom, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because otherwise, who in their right mind would want to go ahead and invest in a business if their customers or their partners could just go ahead and bail when it gets tough? Likewise, that's the thing about marriage. Marriage is a contract. I hate to say this, listeners.
N. Rodgers: People, they think it's a churchy thing, and it's great. You go to church, you do your whole thing at church, that's wonderful. But you know what you do at the end? You signed a piece of paper that's a contract.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. There's a reason why in all 50 states, you have to get a marriage license.
N. Rodgers: Right. You have to pay a fee. You have to go somewhere and say to somebody, I'm engaged, I want to sign up to be with this person, and you sign things at the courthouse or wherever. A lot of times the church officials are also able to file those for you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You sign into the church, but you're still signing an agreement. You're still signing a contract.
J. Aughenbaugh: You signed an agreement that then gets submitted to a clerk of court. Folks, anytime you sign a document that is going to be submitted to a clerk of a court, it now becomes an official, if you will, court document, which means you have obligations. Now, you may not have read those obligations all that close because you were all warm and fuzzy. I'm starting a brand new life. I cannot think of leaving this.
N. Rodgers: Any reason. There will never be anything that will cause us to part. Because nobody gets married thinking, in a year I'm going to get rid of this bum. Nobody does that. That's not how marriage works. Marriage starts off with the warm, fuzzy, I love this person, I want to spend my life with this person. Then after a while, you're like, man, I see one more of your socks on the floor, and I'm going to strangle you with it. I'm done.
J. Aughenbaugh: I can't stand your singing in the morning.
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: I can't have another day start this way. I'm out of here. You know what a court in a particular state is going to say? Well, before you get out of here, there are some things that we need to go ahead and resolve.
N. Rodgers: You have to disassemble your contract. You have to figure out who owns assets, you have to separate.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's called divorce. You are dividing what was once one.
N. Rodgers: Right. Hopefully, as civilized a way as possible. But this also protects people from their partner haring off with all the cool stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: And just saying, I'm leaving you with all the debt and the cat that hates me, and I'm taking all of our expensive cool furniture and all of the money in our accounts, and I'll see you some other time.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's very similar to dissolving a business.
N. Rodgers: It is dissolving a business.
J. Aughenbaugh: Business.
N. Rodgers: It's just that you had a very intimate relationship with your business partner.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But you list all your assets, you list all your debts, and then you try to figure out an equitable distribution of both. Again, the full faith and credit clause was designed to go ahead and say, if you're going to enter into this, understand that simply moving away does not absolve you from all your obligations. Yes.
N. Rodgers: In some ways, it's good because it protects.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It protects people from their partner being unscrupulous, or their business partner being unscrupulous, or somebody else being unscrupulous. It protects them from somebody deciding, I'm going to ruin you. I'm going to ruin everything about your life. I'm going to take everything you have. It helps.
J. Aughenbaugh: Think about it in the family law context, Nia. When you put your name down on a birth certificate as the parent, according to that state.
N. Rodgers: Obligates you for the next 18 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Until that little baby is recognized as an adult, you have certain obligations. Again, any document that you sign that can be submitted to a clerk of court.
N. Rodgers: Your driver's license. You sign for your driver's license, which says that I'm obligated by the laws of my state.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's why the states each have a different test, is that you're signing an agreement that says, I more or less know how to drive in North Carolina. Good luck, Virginia, when I show up. But um anyway. But if I could not use my North Carolina driver's license to buy alcohol in Virginia because they didn't recognize the license, that could also prevent a lot of economic.
J. Aughenbaugh: Activity.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, the full faith and credit clause is the underpinning of you being able to use a government document issued in one state in another state.
N. Rodgers: Right. I want to get a hotel room in Myrtle Beach, I'm going to have to show a driver's license or a state ID of some kind.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Yes.
N. Rodgers: So I can prove who I am. And them recognizing my Virginia driver's license is like, great, we'll rent you a room.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Otherwise, they'd be like, I don't know you. I'm not renting you in a room. I have no idea who you are. You could be some crazy person from Virginia, which is true. I'm a crazy person from Virginia.
J. Aughenbaugh: But that means $200 is not being transferred from you to that business.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: And that hurts economic activity. Again, many of the proponents of the then proposed constitution argued that the situation in the Articles of Confederation was hurting the young nation's economy.
N. Rodgers: Right. Because if South Carolina didn't recognize my Virginia license, then hotels at Myrtle Beach could decide themselves, and I'd end up staying at a hotel that did recognize my license from Virginia, so they would have an economic benefit that the other hotels might not have.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: It becomes uneven and bonkers.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's say an entire state does not recognize Virginia's license, but a nearby state does. Well, then that state gets all that economic activity.
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because why would you bother if you couldn't.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. I'll drive another couple of hours, and let's get to.
N. Rodgers: Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Let's go to Georgia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Exactly. All right. Thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie. It doesn't seem like it's a big deal until you really open the can of worms, and you're like, dude, this is a big deal, and it comes back to Aughie's favorite clause, which is the commerce clause.
J. Aughenbaugh: The commerce clause.
N. Rodgers: Because everything comes back to the commerce clause. We'll tackle that one day. But that's an 18 part episode. Actually, technically, we've tackled it already in almost every episode that we've done. Everything comes back to it. Maybe we don't have to actually talk about it as a separate clause.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, listeners, I would recommend that early on in our podcast history, we did do a multi-episode dive into the commerce clause because Nia was getting annoyed with me because.
N. Rodgers: Resentful, I think is the word you want. But we have merch. If you show up to one of our events, you can get a mug that says, because of the commerce clause. Cause it's a true thing. We also have mugs that say arbitrary and capricious because that is both Scalia and me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Founded a federal law that the bureaucrats of the federal government are like, yes, I know we have to follow the Administrative Procedures Act because we want to make sure that none of our behavior is arbitrary and capricious.
N. Rodgers: Why not? Why can't it be arbitrary and capricious? And Aughie's like, for reasons.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, so many reasons.
N. Rodgers: So many reasons.
J. Aughenbaugh: Anyways, thank you, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Civil Discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaac Hobson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.