On Sunday, August 5, 2001, at 09:29 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
At 09:15 AM 8/5/01 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
So, they ARE asking Congress to try and circumvent that nasty 'ol Commerce Clause. It should be interesting to see what Congress thinks it can fashion th will pass SC muster.
Actually, this may be one of the few areas -- actual interstate trade and taxes -- that come close to the meaning of the Commerce Clause. I suspect a challenge will have to be made on public policy grounds rather than constitutional ones.
California's energy crisis (cough) could be solved overnight if dynamos could be attached to the Founders spinning in their graves. Item: California is seeking to collect taxes on a transaction which did not occur in California. Sounds like a tariff on goods entering California. Sounds like what the commerce clause was designed explicitly to stop. Item: The Warren court ruled that a rib joint in the deep south somewhere could not choose its customers as it wished because turning away certain people might discourage them from travelling to that region, which might lessen the business of bus companies and other restaurants and gas stations and all, and so that was some kind of interference in interstate commerce. The commerce clause was invoked to interfere with a person doing with his property as he wishes. And there are the restrictions on what _crops_ a person may grow, even if never sells a single bushel, even a single peanut, on the alleged grounds that his act of growing a crop will affect what he and his family buy...and thus this affects the local Safeway store's business! Call it the "Suppression of Competition and Protection of Special Interests Ruling." (The usual sources, like Findlaw, have scads of references. This one is "Wickard v. Filburn.") (So, does this "open the door" for regulations on books which urge people to travel to New York instead of Iowa, on the grounds that these kinds of books "influence interstate commerce"? The mind boggles at what lawyers have done to these united states. Time to fire up the ovens and send them to the showers.) --Tim May