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Page Number: 60.0

26 

SACKETT v. EPA 

THOMAS, J., concurring 

to trade or exchange.”  Ibid. (citing Lopez, 514 U. S., at 586– 
587 (THOMAS, J., concurring); Barnett 112–125).10  By de-
parting from this limited meaning, the Court’s cases have
licensed federal regulatory schemes that would have been
“unthinkable” to the Constitution’s Framers and ratifiers. 
Raich, 545 U. S., at 59 (opinion of THOMAS, J.).

Perhaps nowhere is this deviation more evident than in
federal environmental law, much of which is uniquely de-
pendent upon an expansive interpretation of the Commerce
Clause.  See Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclama-
tion Assn., Inc., 452 U. S. 264, 281–283 (1981); see also Brief 
for  Claremont  Institute’s  Center  for  Constitutional  Juris-
prudence as Amicus Curiae 17–25.  And many environmen-
tal regulatory schemes seem to push even the limits of the
Court’s New Deal era Commerce Clause precedents, see Ho-
del,  452  U. S.,  at  309–313  (Rehnquist,  J.,  concurring  in
judgment), to say nothing of the Court’s more recent prece-
dents reining in the commerce power.  See, e.g., SWANCC, 
531 U. S., at 173–174; cf. Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton, 334 
F. 3d 1158, 1160 (CADC 2003) (Roberts, J., dissenting from
denial of rehearing en banc) (“The panel’s approach in this
case  leads  to  the  result  that  regulating  the  taking  [under
the Endangered Species Act] of a hapless toad that, for rea-
sons of its own, lives its entire life in California constitutes 
regulating ‘Commerce among the several States’ ” (ellipsis 
omitted)). 

—————— 

10 Further  scholarship  notes  that  the  term  “commerce”  as  originally 
understood “was bound tightly with the Lex Mercatoria and the sort of 
activities engaged in by merchants: buying and selling products made by
others  (and  sometimes  land),  associated  finance  and  financial  instru-
ments,  navigation  and  other  carriage,  and  intercourse  across  jurisdic-
tional  lines.”  R.  Natelson,  The  Legal  Meaning  of  “Commerce”  in  the 
Commerce Clause, 80 St. John’s L. Rev. 789, 845 (2006).  This “did not 
include agriculture, manufacturing, mining, malum in se crime, or land 
use.  Nor did it include activities that merely ‘substantially affected’ com-
merce; on the contrary, the cases included wording explicitly distinguish-
ing such activities from commerce.”  Ibid.