The legal problem with the Environmental Species Act was that Congress ceded its rule-making authority to the executive branch. If Congress were to instead, for instance, vote to include various species under the Act, and on reasonable means of protection, that would be totally legitimate.
The problem with the Commerce clause is that now that the feds control most everything, most everything DOES relate to interstate commerce; It’s purpose has been utterly thwarted. But it did have a legitimate purpose: There are some matters which states CANNOT adequately address. But instead of relying on federal powers when states cannot adequately address something, we’ve relied on it for anything that the federal government provides a theory for how it COULD address it.
So here’s how you do the ESA the right way: It’s within the national interest to protect the Bald Eagle. The Bald Eagle’s habitat does not follow state lines. Therefore, these following regulations are implemented for any property involved with interstate commerce...
Famer Joe has a family farm. He borrows money from a local bank. He sells vegetables at the local farmer’s market; he sells wheat to the local bakery; etc. His property is exempt from these regulations.
Farmer McKenzie hires workers on agricultural visas. He borrows money from a national corporation which protects its investment with futures traded in New York. He sells his wheat to Pillsbury. His property is not exempt from these regulations.
Maybe Congress might even decide that the futures trading involving McKenzie’s wheat is valuable to the national economy, and write regulations involving futures trading that permit McKenzie to remain exempt from legislating citing the commerce clause.
Note that the Founding States made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, evidently a good place to hide these clauses from Congress (sarc), to clarify that all federal legislative powers are vested in the elected members of Congress, not in the executive or judicial branches.
But not only is Congress wrongly letting the executive branch get away with stealing and exercising legislative powers, but in the example of the Environmental Species Act, this act is actually based on unique, 10th Amendment-protected state powers that the feds have stolen from the states.
By letting the executive branch steal and exercise stolen state powers, corrupt lawmakers are letting the executive branch do Congress’s unconstitutional, dirty work for it so that lawmakers can keep their voting records clean.
And by keeping their voting records clean, career lawmakers are able to fool low-information patriots, patriots who have probably never been taught about the fed’s constitutionally limited powers, into reelecting them.
Are we having fun yet? 8^P
"The problem with the Commerce clause is that now that the feds control most everything, most everything DOES relate to interstate commerce; It’s purpose has been utterly thwarted."
Note that regardless what FDR’s state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices wanted everybody to think about the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers (1.8.3) when it wrongly decided Wickard v. Filburn in Congress’s favor imo, FDR’s justices wrongly ignored the following. They ignored that a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified the following limits of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers based on applying basic reading skills to that relatively simple clause.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
"State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added]." -Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"Therefore, these following regulations are implemented for any property involved with interstate commerce..."
Thomas Jefferson had recommended that the fed's constitutionally limited powers be interpreted narrowly, evidenced by the excerpt from Gibbons v. Ogden above, the states amending the Constitution to delegate new powers to the feds as a last resort.
"In every event, I would rather construe so narrowly as to oblige the nation to amend, and thus declare what powers they would agree to yield, than too broadly, and indeed, so broadly as to enable the executive and the Senate to do things which the Constitution forbids." —Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793.
But until the states decide to amend the Constitution, it's up to the individual states to define and protect endangered species.
"The States should be left to do whatever acts they can do as well as the General Government." --Thomas Jefferson to John Harvie, 1790.
But should the states decide that they aren't up to the job for some reason, then there's nothing stopping them from amending the Constitution to give the job to the feds.
Finally, the best remedy to stop federal government overreach into the affairs of the sovereign states is to repeal the ill-conceived 17th Amendment imo.
The 16th Amendment can disappear too.