"Jury-rigging Federal Commerce Power: How legalistic baling wire, duct tape and flour paste have been used to cobble together a Rube Goldberg apparatus of legal precedent" by Gary Marbut

Date:   4/29/2010 5:13:26 AM ( 14 y ago)

"... in 1942. Wickard was the Secretary of Agriculture and Roscoe Filburn was a farmer. In order to attempt to bolster wheat prices, Congress had authorized the Secretary of Agriculture (Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938) to implement wheat-growing quotas, for states, for counties within states and for farms within counties. Filburn grew the allowed acreage of wheat, plus some more to feed his family and livestock. Officials of the Department of Agriculture fined Filburn for planting, growing and harvesting the extra wheat. Filburn sued, claiming that Congress lacked authority under its power to 'regulate commerce … among the several states' to tell him he couldn’t grow wheat for strictly on-farm use, to feed his family and livestock. Filburn’s claim that the extra wheat never left his farm was not contested.

In Wickard v. Filburn, Justice Roberts caved to Roosevelt’s threat of court-packing, switched sides, and voted with a new 5-4 majority to affirm congressional Commerce Clause power. In order to arrive at that conclusion, the new Supreme Court majority had to to gin up some very inventive rationale about how growing and using on-farm wheat was subject to the authority of Congress to 'regulate commerce … among the several states'. The majority decision 'reasoned' that if Filburn had not fed his extra wheat to his family and livestock, it might have traveled across a state line, and that if every farmer did what Filburn had done then the practice would have enough aggregate effect that it could affect interstate commerce.

To get there, the Court had to redefine 'regulate' to mean 'prohibit'. It had to redefine 'commerce' to include agriculture and production of goods. And, it had to redefine 'among' to mean 'within'. Although the Court did not also redefine the word 'states', it did effectively redefine the relationship between the national government and the states."
http://labvirus.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/jury-rigging-federal-commerce-power/



 

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