# Missouri v. Holland **Status: stub — expand.** Supreme Court decision of **April 19, 1920** (252 U.S. 416, 7–2, Holmes) upholding the Migratory Bird Treaty Act against a Tenth Amendment challenge from Missouri. A nearly identical federal statute had been struck down by lower courts as exceeding Congress's enumerated powers; once the same policy was wrapped in a treaty with Great Britain, the implementing legislation became valid under the Necessary and Proper Clause. The doctrine — that the treaty power can reach subjects otherwise reserved to the states — made the treaty clause the widest channel in the Constitution, and provoked a decades-long backlash. The [[Bricker Amendment]] fight of the 1950s was an attempt to close it by constitutional amendment; it failed by a single vote in 1954 but succeeded in practice, because presidents since have avoided Article II treaties in favor of executive agreements and the Senate attaches non-self-executing declarations as a matter of routine. *Bond v. United States* (2014) narrowed the doctrine's reach by construing implementing statutes not to intrude on traditional state criminal law, without overruling *Holland*. *Reid v. Covert* (1957) had already established the outer limit: no treaty can authorize what the Constitution forbids. ## See also - [[How a Treaty Is Made and Ratified]] - [[Medellín v. Texas]] - [[Bricker Amendment]] - [[Federalism]]