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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (4625)	4/27/2001 11:35:14 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6089

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had a distinct agenda for the nation's courts: to reduce the powers of the federal government Given that one clear purpose of the Constitution itself was to provide for a federal government of very limited powers, what this really means is courts which will adhere to the Constitution. Are you aware that the federal courts have held, for example, that the federal government has the right to prohibit you from growing tomatoes in your own garden for your own consumption? Not on any health grounds. No. Your tomatoes intervere with interstate commerce. The legal reasoning goes as follows: if you didn't grow the tomatoes you would buy tomatoes. Most tomatoes are transported in interstate commerce. Therefore growing your own tomatoes reduces the number of tomatoes the growers in other states can sell, causes the price to go down, reduces the amount of money truckers will earn transporting those tomatoes, etc. Therefore your growing tomatoes for your family to eat interferes with interstate commerce and is therefore a proper activity for the federal government to regulate under the interstate commerce clause. I mean, what would happen to the California tomato growers if every family grew its own tomatoes? Terrible! This is based on an actual case. The actual case in question dealt with wheat, as I recall, not tomatoes; the farmer was found guilty of violating federal law for growing wheat for his family's consumption in violation of the wheat quotas the feds had established. But the legal reasoning is identical; I change the commodity because most of don't grow wheat but many of us do grow tomatoes. When I read this case in law school it was an eye-opener. Made me realize just how far the federal government was willing to go to control every aspect of our lives from D.C. There are a lot of principles Reagan and Bush 1 looked for in their judges I didn't approve of. But the more judges they can find that will understand the basic concept of federalism the Constitution was designed to protect, the better.