Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Breyer, J., dissenting

Virtually all local activity, when instances are aggregated,
can have “substantial effects on employment, production,
transit, or consumption.” Hence Congress could “regulate
any crime,” and perhaps “marriage, divorce, and child-
rearing” as well, obliterating the “Constitution’s distinction
between national and local authority.” Ante, at 615, 616;
Lopez, 514 U. S., at 558; cf. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp.
v. United States, 295 U. S. 495, 548 (1935) (need for distinc-
tion between “direct” and “indirect” effects lest there “be
virtually no limit to the federal power”); Hammer v. Dagen-
hart, 247 U. S. 251, 276 (1918) (similar observation).

This consideration, however, while serious, does not reﬂect
a jurisprudential defect, so much as it reﬂects a practical
reality. We live in a Nation knit together by two centuries
of scientiﬁc, technological, commercial, and environmental
change. Those changes, taken together, mean that virtually
every kind of activity, no matter how local, genuinely can
affect commerce, or its conditions, outside the State—at least
when considered in the aggregate. Heart of Atlanta Motel,
379 U. S., at 251. And that fact makes it close to impossible
for courts to develop meaningful subject-matter categories
that would exclude some kinds of local activities from ordi-
nary Commerce Clause “aggregation” rules without, at the
same time, depriving Congress of the power to regulate
activities that have a genuine and important effect upon
interstate commerce.

Since judges cannot change the world, the “defect” means
that, within the bounds of the rational, Congress, not the
courts, must remain primarily responsible for striking the
appropriate state/federal balance. Garcia v. San Antonio
Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 552 (1985);
ante, at 645–649 (Souter, J., dissenting); Kimel v. Florida
Bd. of Regents, 528 U. S. 62, 93–94 (2000) (Stevens, J., dis-
senting) (Framers designed important structural safeguards
to ensure that, when Congress legislates, “the normal opera-
tion of the legislative process itself would adequately defend