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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Opinion of the Court

marriage, divorce, and childrearing on the national economy
is undoubtedly signiﬁcant. Congress may have recognized
this specter when it expressly precluded § 13981 from being
used in the family law context.6 See 42 U. S. C. § 13981(e)(4).
Under our written Constitution, however, the limitation
of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legisla-
tive grace.7 See Lopez, supra, at 575–579 (Kennedy, J.,
concurring); Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 176–178.

6 We are not the ﬁrst to recognize that the but-for causal chain must
have its limits in the Commerce Clause area.
In Lopez, 514 U. S., at 567,
we quoted Justice Cardozo’s concurring opinion in A. L. A. Schechter Poul-
try Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495 (1935):
“There is a view of causation that would obliterate the distinction between
what is national and what is local in the activities of commerce. Motion at
the outer rim is communicated perceptibly, though minutely, to recording
instruments at the center. A society such as ours ‘is an elastic medium
which transmits all tremors throughout its territory; the only question is
of their size.’ ”
Id., at 554 (quoting United States v. A. L. A. Schechter
Poultry Corp., 76 F. 2d 617, 624 (CA2 1935) (L. Hand, J., concurring)).

7 Justice Souter’s theory that Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1 (1824),
Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528
(1985), and the Seventeenth Amendment provide the answer to these
cases, see post, at 645–652, is remarkable because it undermines this cen-
tral principle of our constitutional system. As we have repeatedly noted,
the Framers crafted the federal system of Government so that the people’s
rights would be secured by the division of power. See, e. g., Arizona v.
Evans, 514 U. S. 1, 30 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); Gregory v. Ash-
croft, 501 U. S. 452, 458–459 (1991) (cataloging the beneﬁts of the federal
design); Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 242 (1985)
(“The ‘constitutionally mandated balance of power’ between the States
and the Federal Government was adopted by the Framers to ensure the
protection of ‘our fundamental liberties’ ”) (quoting Garcia, supra, at 572
(Powell, J., dissenting)). Departing from their parliamentary past, the
Framers adopted a written Constitution that further divided authority at
the federal level so that the Constitution’s provisions would not be deﬁned
solely by the political branches nor the scope of legislative power limited
only by public opinion and the Legislature’s self-restraint. See, e. g., Mar-
bury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 176 (1803) (Marshall, C. J.) (“The powers
of the legislature are deﬁned and limited; and that those limits may not
It is thus a “ ‘per-
be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written”).