"Wickard thus establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself 'commercial', in that it is not produced for sale"
So what the authors of the Constitution meant by "interstate commerce" is "intrastate not-commerce."
For those of you not aware, this is one of the biggest power grabs of the federal government in US history. This decision is used to allow the commerce clause to cover huge swaths of authority.
No, that ruling by the Court is not an error, it just has different interpretation of the Commerce Clause than yours. Even if you don't necessarily agree with their interpretation (and I'm not sure I do, but they make a compelling argument) it wasn't factual error. It's extremely disingenuous to claim it was. That case entirely is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
>The Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution's Commerce Clause under Article 1 Section 8, which permits the United States Congress "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." The Court decided that Filburn's wheat-growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, which is traded nationally (interstate), and is therefore within the scope of the Commerce Clause. Although Filburn's relatively small amount of production of more wheat than he was allotted would not affect interstate commerce itself, the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers just like Filburn would certainly become substantial. Therefore, according to the court, Filburn's production could be regulated by the federal government.
If the Supreme Court interprets the Second Amendment to apply to the upper appendages we call arms, that is a factual error, not just a different interpretation. It is possible for an interpretation, given the evidence, to be factually wrong in as much as anything can be factually wrong.
And by that argument, you could Butterfly Effect literally any action as having commerce implications and thus hyperextend the commerce clause into completely reshaping the balance of power between federal and state government. There are just a few supreme court decisions that very rapidly shifted our federal government from one of very limited and explicitly laid out powers, reserving all other powers for the states, to a federal government that has supremacy on almost every topic even several levels of indirection away from their explicitly stated powers.
This was effectively a revolution. The form and breadth of the federal government before and after this and other decisions that made their power nearly universal is as different as the federal government under the articles of confederation versus the constitutional federal government.
The original intention was to make a federal government of limited powers. Between the incredible expansions of the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause to effectively cover every major aspect of daily life, and the supreme court decision that claimed that the 10th amendment was effectively a "noop", we've reached a system where the federal government has almost universal control. Then they finished up the final power grab by using the power of the purse by taxing more than they need to run federal programs and then only returning money to the states based on compliance with the rest of their agenda.
The dream that was a federal government with limited powers died along the way in the United States. Their power is almost universal today, and that was not the stated or written intention from the start.
Uhh, that's like saying a CPU is not sold if intel includes it in a computer that was sold. Aka, this was large scale production to feed animals that where then consumed.
So, by any reasonable definition this was commercial wheat production. Now, if he was farming wheat because he liked how wheat fields looked then never used or harvested that wheat for anything you might have a point.
PS: It's a common standpoint that you can't get around laws by this kind of nominal rule bending. AKA, we are a non profit, so the commerce clause must not apply as we are non commercial enterprise.
> Uhh, that's like saying a CPU is not sold if intel includes it in a computer that was sold. Aka, this was large scale production to feed animals that where then sold.
Actually this seems perfectly sensible to me. Absent Wickard, we might expect that the national government can regulate the sale of the computer across state lines, but not the installation of the CPU within a state.
I agree a different rulings could have been reasonable which is why the court took the case. My point was simply it was not so unreasonable as to clearly be a mistake.
However, I do think from a pure practical standpoint, letting companies side step regulations by their structure is a bad idea. Aka. If every pig farmer now ends up a a wheat farmer on the side that's a bad outcome.
Words have meanings. Growing wheat for private consumption on one's own land is not "commerce" whatever the honourable idiots of the US Supreme Court think.
This argument can be applied to anything, even black market industries. The commerce clause ruling allows congress to make a law about anything explicitly not forbidden in the Constitution or given as a power of a different branch. This was clearly not the writers intentions. It is a loophole of the sort that a judge wouldn't tolerate being used against them in their own courtroom.
The fact we dislike the conclusion does not make the argument void. However, I believe the interpretation is limited by magnitude. Someone growing a tiny number of poppy plants can't extract enough material to make meaningful amounts of Opium. Thus, they don't impact the illegal Opium trade.
Again, the regulation was he could use up to 11.1 acres and he did around twice that which is significant.
Huh? That's not the argument at all. The court's opinion was that because he was growing his own wheat, he was not buying wheat from others, which in turn would affect wheat prices (thus interstate commerce). It had nothing to do with the animals. This case was most certainly overreaching, and the court itself later acknowledged that.
In their own words commercial Consumption and commercial Production are both commerce. Remember, if he had used less than 11.1 acres there would have been no problem so this was significant production and significant consumption.
"Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us...[b]ut even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'"[4]
In other words, the fact he was Producing wheat or just Using wheat does not side step the issue. He was both a consumer and producer of wheat and thus clearly impacting the wheat market. That final bit just means picking if was a direct or indirect impact does not matter.
Now, I and others may not agree with the interpretation. But, it's not so crazy as to be a clear mistake.
Which is why I said farming wheat in such a way that it is separated from the market aka not harvesting it, would have been a useful but different argument.
That's exactly what I said. I was refuting the analogy above about CPUs. It had nothing to do with feeding the wheat to animals. It was simply because his growing of wheat affected how much wheat he would buy from the market.
How he used it has little impact, but the fact he used it does. If he planted but did not harvest wheat then there would have been no impact on the market. The fact he used it implied there was a connection to the market.
The linked article is about errors in facts that were part of the Court's decision making process.
The criticism you are making is about how the Court interpreted the law, which is a fundamentally different sort of error.
There are multiple theories of constitutional interpretation, and there is no broad consensus among Supreme Court Justices for which to use . Only some of them involve trying to discern the authors' intent.
In Wickard, I can't find any reference to the intent of the authors of the Constitution, so I don't believe this is a case of a factual error.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion.
The relevant bits for people who don't want to click:
>Utah, like a number of other states, has a provision that stops the clock on the statute of limitations whenever the potential defendant is out of the state. In legal terminology, stopping the clock is referred to as “tolling” the statute of limitations.
>Weinstein was out of the state of Utah for most of the 1997-2008 period, since he presumably visited the state usually just for Sundance. That would probably amount to less than two weeks a year in state. While he was out of the state, the statute of limitations clock would have been paused.
>Is absentee tolling against a easily locatable defendant constitutional? Maybe not. The Constitution’s Commerce Clause — not usually referenced in criminal cases — might provide the basis for a challenge. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that civil absentee tolling placed an undue burden on interstate commerce — and therefore violated the Commerce Clause — when applied against an out-of-state corporation that could have been sued before the statute of limitations ran out.
>Lower courts have extended the ruling to also protect out-of-state individuals from tardy civil suit... Criminal law may be a different matter.
>“I am not sure whether the Commerce Clause analysis would apply the same way to a criminal, as opposed to a civil, statute of limitations,” said University of San Diego law professor Walter Heiser, who has written on civil absentee tolling. “A State’s interests in deterring and punishing criminal conduct may well outweigh any concerns about the effect on interstate commerce.”
>Yet, in a 1941 case, the U.S. Supreme Court did indeed use the Commerce Clause to invalidate a California criminal law, an “anti-Okie” statute that barred relocation of indigents into the state. However, that crime was inherently interstate, whereas rape is not. But Weinstein’s trips to Utah were for business purposes; he was engaged in interstate commerce. That’s a lot of “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.”
>Yet another Supreme Court precedent is adverse to Weinstein, a 2000 case that struck down portions of the federal Violence Against Women Act. The Court held that the “non-economic, criminal nature” of such violence took such assaults outside the ambit of the Commerce Clause. That narrow view ignores the economic aspects that many say is inherent in all oppression of women but, ironically, could mean that absentee tolling would survive and Weinstein would lose.
>Or a court might be swayed by the intertwined nature of Weinstein’s economic and alleged criminal activity. After all, his alleged victims and his Sundance visits were work-related. A court might decide that under those circumstances, the Commerce Clause could indeed come into play and hand Weinstein a win.
Given the pre-election kerfuffle with judicial nominations, I'm floored that Roosevelt appointed eight judges to the Supreme Court. I wonder what the headlines were like around that time. Can you imagine the state of Twitter of Obama or Trump managed to pick all-but-one of the members of the SC?
Laws of society are not the same as laws of physics. They'll be interpreted to be what the current culture commands.
Thomas Jefferson was on board with the notion: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind."
They wrote a social contract that's obviously ripe for manipulation and abuse by the current powers that be. I see no reason to try and read the minds of dead men and opine for the past. Especially since I'm pretty sure they all wrote about fears to the effect of future America deifying them when they are but humble, fallible, humans.
Humans quit caring about the past because it's not relevant in future reality where things are much different. The inputs are all different.
Goodhart's law, man.
But by all means, keep believing in your religion that you appear to believe is failing you. I'm sure your support will make it better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
"Wickard thus establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself 'commercial', in that it is not produced for sale"
So what the authors of the Constitution meant by "interstate commerce" is "intrastate not-commerce."
For those of you not aware, this is one of the biggest power grabs of the federal government in US history. This decision is used to allow the commerce clause to cover huge swaths of authority.