>>They didn't. -- Nor did Congress have the power to pay him 3X world market price.
The USSC should have ignored the whole mess on that basis, but instead compounded the congressional violation by committing a constitutional violation of their own -- in agreeing that the power to regulate includes the 'power to prohibit'.<<
I'm not on their side - but I'm acknowledging that the wheat decision sounds an awful like pot and machine gun cases and what I thought was outrageous new violation of the constitution is in fact a repeat of "settled law."
A very good example how "reasonable" violations of the explicit language and the original intent of the Constitution, often grow into quite unreasonable violations which, often as not, turn the original intent and the original understanding of the Constitutional provision in question, on their heads.