Does the Commerce Clause Empower Congress to Regulate Every Living Thing?
30th October 2017
You might think so.
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.
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“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.