To: HPilot who wrote (557093 ) 3/26/2010 3:33:50 PM From: tejek Read Replies (1) | Respond to Like I said, you need to look to the New Deal for precedent. From your link:"The "New Deal Court" drastically changed the focus of the Court's inquiry in determining whether legislation fell within the scope of the Commerce Clause, and in some sense returned to the concept articulated in Gibbons. Central to this theory was the belief that the democratic process was sufficient to confine the legislative power. Thus one of the central issues was whether the judiciary or the elected representatives of the people should decide what commerce is. The Court began to defer to the Congress on the theory that determining whether legislation impacted commerce appropriately was a legislative, not a judicial decision. The debate over Commerce Clause jurisprudence thus includes philosophic differences over whether Congressional abuse of the Commerce Clause is best redressed at the ballot box or in the Federal courts.In 1941 the Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated the production of goods shipped across state lines. The Court upheld the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which sought to stabilize wide fluctuations in the market price for wheat by stabilizing supply through quotas. The Court's decision rejected former decisions that seemed to focus on "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was production, consumption, or marketing. Those formalistic characterizations were not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us. That an activity: is of local character may help in a doubtful case to determine whether Congress intended to reach it.... But 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.'Congress could apply national quotas to wheat grown on one's own land, for one's own consumption, because the total of such local production and consumption was sufficiently large as to impact the overall goal of stabilizing prices. This change in the Court's decisions is often referred to as the Constitutional Revolution of 1937, in which the Court shifted from engaging in judicial activism to protect property rights, to a paradigm which focused most strongly on protecting civil liberties. [7] Some commentators view the Court's decision in United States v. Lopez (1995), as an important swing in the pendulum away from an expansive view of Congressional power."
