Broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause

[bedstuy]

That's a silly way to look at this issue.  Regulating commerce necessitates regulating both commerce itself and anything that substantially affects commerce.  So, the definition of commerce is basically meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

That's the crux of the problem, the Supreme Court has tried all these weird formulations, directly affects, substantially affects, they're all pretty useless definitions in practice.  So, instead we have a sort of functional definition defined by what falls within state regulatory power and what Congress decides to regulate.  That works fine and the people who argue otherwise are just conservatives who want the Constitution to constrain the government to a specific type of 19th century free market barbarism.