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few economists today would disagree with the Court's reasoning in its unanimous opinion in Wickard that permitting wheat to be freely grown and processed into grain for animal feed for use on farms where it is grown would have no effect on the production and price of wheat placed into interstate commerce.

Economists are *not* judges, nor should there opinions be used to make judicial decisions.

Taken at face value, *everything* affects interstate commerce, which renders the commerce clause void of meaning, if anything affecting interstate commerce may be regulated by the federal government.

My statement about "gay marriage" was to show the absurdity of the idea that the federal government has the right to regulate everything.

As late as 1995, in Lopez, the Supreme Court ruled, that for the commerce clause to have meaning, there has to be a limit on the reach of federal regulation.

In 2005, they reversed that with the Raich decision, on home grown marijuna. It was not Justice Scalia's finest hour.

The expertise of economists is frequently relied on by trial courts in the form of reports and testimony. Moreover, a highly influential conservative school of legal scholarship known as "Law and Economics" has thoroughly demonstrated that appellate courts frequently consider how markets work when they make and explain their decisions.

The classic explanation of the broad view of the Commerce Clause power was by Chief Justice Marshall in 1824. The power to regulate Commerce is "the power to regulate; that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the Constitution." The absence of such limitations in the text of the Constitution itself is a key difficulty for textualists like Scalia.

Years ago, in law school, I was troubled by the contradictory views of the Commerce Clause and Wickard as set out in my casebook and in conservative literature, so I took several evenings to read the case thoroughly and the cases that it cited and relied on. I soon realized that the restrictive view of the Commerce Clause had long been in retreat due to the way that the country had been knitted together by modern technology. And the Commerce Clause had frequently been invoked against local monopolies and restraints of trade in state and local law.