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529US3

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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Souter, J., dissenting

agreement with the majority is not, however, conﬁned to
logic, for history has shown that categorical exclusions have
proven as unworkable in practice as they are unsupportable
in theory.

A

.

Obviously, it would not be inconsistent with the text of
the Commerce Clause itself to declare “noncommercial” pri-
mary activity beyond or presumptively beyond the scope
of the commerce power. That variant of categorical ap-
proach is not, however, the sole textually permissible way
of deﬁning the scope of the Commerce Clause, and any such
neat limitation would at least be suspect in the light of the
ﬁnal sentence of Art. I, § 8, authorizing Congress to make
“all Laws .
. necessary and proper” to give effect to
its enumerated powers such as commerce. See United
States v. Darby, 312 U. S. 100, 118 (1941) (“The power of
Congress . . . extends to those activities intrastate which so
affect interstate commerce or the exercise of the power of
Congress over it as to make regulation of them appropriate
means to the attainment of a legitimate end, the exercise of
the granted power of Congress to regulate interstate com-
merce”). Accordingly, for signiﬁcant periods of our history,
the Court has deﬁned the commerce power as plenary, unsus-
ceptible to categorical exclusions, and this was the view ex-
pressed throughout the latter part of the 20th century in
the substantial effects test. These two conceptions of the
commerce power, plenary and categorically limited, are in
fact old rivals, and today’s revival of their competition sum-
mons up familiar history, a brief reprise of which may be
helpful in posing what I take to be the key question going to
the legitimacy of the majority’s decision to breathe new life
into the approach of categorical limitation.

in which the states have traditionally engaged as marking the boundary
of the restriction upon the federal taxing power. But there is no such
limitation upon the plenary power to regulate commerce”).