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View Full Version : Does the Commerce Clause Empower Congress to Regulate Every Living Thing?




Suzanimal
10-30-2017, 12:59 PM
According to a Supreme Court brief filed today, Utah prairie dogs "produce nothing of importance except the annoyance of the surrounding population," and "they make terrible pets." The brief, which urges the Court to hear a constitutional challenge to a federal regulation protecting the rodents, concedes that they are "adorable little critters" but notes that "the protection of cuteness is not a congressional power" granted by the Constitution.

The brief, filed by the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation (which publishes this blog), and the Individual Rights Foundation, asks the Supreme Court to overturn a March 2017 ruling upholding the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to list Utah prairie dogs as a "threatened" species. That designation makes it a federal crime to "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect" animals on the list. In rejecting a challenge to the listing by People for the Ethical Treatment of Property Owners, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit relied on an alarmingly broad understanding of the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce.

"The government seeks to protect an abundant, commercially irrelevant, and wholly intrastate rodent without regard for whether such regulation has any connection to economic activity, let alone commerce among the several states," says the Cato/Reason/IRF brief. "The Utah prairie dog is not a marketable commodity. There is no illicit trade in prairie dog horns or hides for the government to suppress. They carry no firearms into school zones. Their domestic relations are none of the government's business. Finally, they have neither purchased health insurance nor plan to do so in future." Those are references to Supreme Court cases in which the government claimed (mostly without success) that a federal law was constitutional because the activity it regulated had a "substantial effect" on interstate commerce.

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Utah prairie dogs, by the way, are doing just fine. The Fish and Wildlife Service considers them threatened only because the animals live mostly on private property. "While 70 percent of the population resides on private land, the government counts only the federal-land population on the theory that bloodthirsty Utahns would butcher privately domiciled prairie dogs if the species were delisted," Cato et al. say. "Thus this non-endangered 'threatened' species is listed on a theory that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would place all organic life in the United States into congressional jurisdiction because some conjectural private party might impose some vaguely defined harm at some hypothetical date in the future."

http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/30/does-the-commerce-clause-empower-congres

The Gold Standard
10-30-2017, 01:51 PM
Sure does. Who is going to stop them?

NorthCarolinaLiberty
10-30-2017, 01:56 PM
Yeah, that and American pigs' love affair with food.


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