[tacticalogic]

The Fourteenth Amendment has been the avenue by which the Federal Courts have interfered with the exercise of State Police powers, where someone claimed, on one of various rationales, that they were unfair. The problem is that the Fourteenth Amendment has been the vehicle to apply restrictions originally put on the Federal Government, which was not supposed to act in certain fields, to the States, which from time immemorial have had the role to act in those very fields.

I agree, but the usurpation of state police powers by the federal government is no exclusive to Fourteenth Amendment issues.

"I write separately only to express my view that the very notion of a "substantial effects" test under the Commerce Clause is inconsistent with the original understanding of Congress' powers and with this Court's early Commerce Clause cases. By continuing to apply this rootless and malleable standard, however circumscribed, the Court has encouraged the Federal Government to persist in its view that the Commerce Clause has virtually no limits. Until this Court replaces its existing Commerce Clause jurisprudence with a standard more consistent with the original understanding, we will continue to see Congress appropriating state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce."

-Justice Clarence Thomas

[Ohioan]

Of course, you are right. I was concentrating on issues of where the Federal Courts have nullified the States' in the exercise of their Police Powers. The Commerce Clause has been the vehicle by which the Federal Government has sought to impose its own moral judgments in place of those of Americans on an individual, local or State basis. The one approach has wrought havoc on local defenses of community values; the other has imposed a virulent Socialist ethos in their place.