news story / By Japhet Weeks

First to Contact, First to Contract

“The law is probably unconstitutional,” he said when reached on his cell phone last week, “because it encroaches on the federal government’s exclusive sovereign authority to raise and maintain a military, including engaging in the recruitment of people.”

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA specializing in constitutional law, agrees. “It’s clearly unconstitutional,” he said from his office last week. “Any state laws regulating federal recruiters are preempted by federal government action.”

Volokh likened the situation, hypothetically, to the cities of Arcata and Eureka trying to limit the powers of federal investigators when it comes to busting dope growers. “A subdivision of the state of California can no more control what the federal government does than it can say [to a federal agency like the FBI] we refuse to let you arrest people in our county,” he said. “That’s a federal power that no individual state can try to prevent the federal government from exercising.”

None of this is particularly news to Meserve. He’s aware that the federal government may contest the law — at the same time, he’s hopeful they won’t. “It is possible that it won’t be challenged … because they’ll think it’s too small; why bother for the number of recruits that they get,” he said. According to Meserve the number of local recruits annually is somewhere between 20 and 30.

This also isn’t the first time Meserve has taken on the federal government in a manner that may prove to be unconstitutional. In 2003, when Meserve served on the Arcata City Council, he spearheaded an ordinance that outlawed compliance with the U.S. Patriot Act by city employees. Meserve told the San Francisco Chronicle then that the law was “probably illegal, if you accept the Patriot Act as legal.”

In the end, Meserve has his fingers crossed that the constitutionality of the proposed ordinance — which appears, he says, to have broad support in both Eureka and Arcata — won’t ever come into question. After all, the Patriot Act ordinance has yet to be challenged, despite the fact that it inspired other cities — including Seattle and Minneapolis - to pass similar ordinances.

He said of his latest brainchild: “The best-case scenario is if we never [have] to issue a ticket and it just [makes] them leave the kids under 18 alone — that would be great.”

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