[ryanlol]

the United States Congress shall have power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

The courts and the congress have a very strange interpretation of this, for example in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

[ailideex]

I meant more on how that is relevant to free speech. The case you cited seems to be about cannabis.

[craftyguy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Atlanta_Motel_v._Unit...

(note: I am not saying I disagree with a decision to outlaw discrimination, just pointing out the absurdity that the Commerce Clause was 'interpreted' as being the only way to do this [which ultimately resulted in government limiting free speech])

[ryanlol]

I'm not really sure. But the ever-expanding scope of the commerce clause is presumably what he refers to as weaponization.

[sbuttgereit]

This is my favorite example of this overreach...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

In hand-wavy terms... in this case the commerce clause was used to prevent a farmer from growing wheat on his own land for use in feeding his own livestock. The federal government had established limits on wheat production at the time as part of the "New Deal".

[gamblor956]

That was not overreach. At the time, laws limited how much wheat a farmer could grow so as to maintain the national price of wheat. (Wheat hasn't been a purely local product in more than a century.) The farmer in the case grew more than his allotment. He sold the allowed amount but then used the excess to feed his own cows, rather than buying it from the market (or taking it out of his original allotment). If allowed, at scale this would render the crop controls meaningless and would have destroyed the price of wheat during a time of war, driving thousands of farmers into destitution and eliminating a potential resource needed for the war effort.

[sbuttgereit]

Of course it was overreach and a tortured interpretation of the commerce clause to get there.

The "time of war" argument is completely bogus. The word "war" doesn't appear anywhere in the decision itself nor are its consequences limited to wartime in any way. The law in question was a 1938 law that was trying to increase government management of agriculture economic activity. While progressive are happy to use any crisis that comes along to further this sort of overreach into economic activity, including war, one could equally say that the courts decision was probably at least as influenced by the fact that Roosevelt had appointed 8 of the Justices that heard the case and the court was ideologically aligned with him... since the 1938 law was part of his disastrous economic program (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D...), it's little wonder they sided with the government.

[gamblor956]

Please reread your US history. The law was passed during the Great Recession. The ruling was issued during WWII.

And wheat absolutely was a national, not a local, product in 1930, which made it well within the textual scope of the commerce clause. Whether or not they should have implemented wheat controls is separate from the fact that they had the power to do so.

The whole reason this power was given to Congress was so that no one state could unfairly regulate economic activity in another state. The idea being that it was better to have one set of relatively neutral rules than dozens.

As for your study: the two authors of the study are noted neoconservatives who claim that the economy only recovered when unions lost their power, completely at odds with actual history, in which the height of the American economy coincided with the rise of union power.