Commerce Clause, Katzenbach v. McClung

[A18]

Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964)

A thoroughly ridiculous ruling. As I've explained at length in earlier posts, interstate commerce has everything to do with trade between the states--or specifically, the shipping of goods across state lines--and nothing to do with racial discrimination. (See: Justice Story's Exposition on the Commerce Clause)

Justice Douglas even went as far as to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause was grounds for sustaining the act. I find this assertion to be patently absurd. The amendment is not ambigious at all: "No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

[Emsworth]

The interstate commerce clause deals, as Philip pointed out, only with trade between the states. Even John Marshall conceded that a transaction taking place wholly within a state is not subject to congressional control under this clause. In Gibbons v. Ogden, he admitted, "It is not intended to say that these words [the commerce clause] comprehend that commerce which is completely internal, which is carried on between man and man in a State, or between different parts of the same State." The completely internal commerce of any state is entirely within that state's jurisdiction, not within the sphere of the federal government.

The equal protection argument is also highly absurd. The equal protection clause only binds state governments, not private individuals. As the Supreme Court held in the Civil Rights Cases, "It is state action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment ... It does not authorize congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights; but to provide modes of redress against the operation of state laws."

[Bono]

A thoroughly ridiculous ruling.

It certainly has one of the most ridiculous names.

[A18]

Katzenbach represents the ultimate corruption of the Court's Commerce Clause jurisprudence. Whereas NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. was just an awful decision, Katzenbach was verging on self-parody.

A few of the Court's arguments are worth reciting:
(1) Discrimination by Ollie's and other businesses contributed in various ways to a lower level of general business activity and productivity in Alabama, thereby decreasing the flow of all kinds of goods into and out of Alabama.
(2) Because a significant part of Ollie's food had crossed a state line, Congress was entitled to regulate all further dealings with that food.
(3) Discrimination by Ollie's and other similar restaurants made life more difficult for African-American interstate travelers in Alabama.

Needless to say, these "arguments" are more an excuse for sustaining the act than anything else. If part of the Constitution had to be distorted to uphold the Civil Rights Act, one of the Reconstruction Amendments would have been more appropriate--my preference would have been the Thirteenth.

But this case was really just the culmination of what began in United States v. Darby: if the activity has some remote relation to interstate commerce, the Congress can regulate it. And when Congress can regulate that, it can regulate anything.

I would have dissented.