The catch-all clause. Very little in 1787 was interstate commerce or of a global nature.
Today the opposite is the case. Almost nothing we do or sell or buy is intrastate anymore.
It helps to read the column. Lots.
what I grow on my property and use at home should never be subject to interstate commerce regulations.
I’d like the Supremes to rule that the original intent of the phrase, meant that Congress could act to make interstate commerce easier, by stopping barriers, and not giving it total power over all commercial activity.
Even in 1787 people understood that local economic activities invariably and indirectly could effect global economic activities.
Adam Smith’s book ‘the Wealth of nations’(1776) perhaps the definitive book on economics for most of the 19th and late 18th century. Made it quite clear that all economics were interconnected.
The point is just because something happens does not mean it is commerce nor that it is intrastate. Indeed the word ‘regulate’ itself didn’t mean to give congress anything other than the power to abolish trade barriers the stated justification for which it was created(Informed by abusive trade access practices by some State’s in the 1780’s towards others). Even the word to ‘regulate’ was to ‘make regular’ not to control.
No clause of any document makes any sense if you expand it to include all possible implications that might be effected no matter how indirect. So your either talking in its most limited sense or you might as well not be reading at all. One could after all claim the power to make war also includes the power to control speech, and minor trade activities as they too could indirectly lead to or even constitute an act of war.
This was one of the worse court edicts in American history made for purely political expediencies. That said the author is wrong, reversing it is not likely to reverse any of its consequences of edict. The Federal ‘court’ is in in practice already a political legislative body in so much that it has demonstrated the power to rewrite the law on a case by case basis. Precedent only matters in so much that it provides them with the paper to write new laws with the promus that subsequent cases be decided by them and their underlings the same way. A proms they regularly break with new edicts.
The problem started when the other 2 branches and levels of government started acting as their agents enforcing such edicts rather than as checks and balances upon the abuses of such power.
Thus even the partial overturning of that precedent in United States v. Lopez is inconsequential.
The court is even more autocratic and lawless today than it was in 1944.