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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Souter, J., dissenting

Justice Souter, with whom Justice Stevens, Justice

Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join, dissenting.

The Court says both that it leaves Commerce Clause
precedent undisturbed and that the Civil Rights Remedy
of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, 42 U. S. C.
§ 13981, exceeds Congress’s power under that Clause.
I ﬁnd
the claims irreconcilable and respectfully dissent.1

I

Our cases, which remain at least nominally undisturbed,
stand for the following propositions. Congress has the
power to legislate with regard to activity that, in the aggre-
gate, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. See
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111, 124–128 (1942); Hodel v.
Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Assn., Inc., 452
U. S. 264, 277 (1981). The fact of such a substantial effect is
not an issue for the courts in the ﬁrst instance, ibid., but
for the Congress, whose institutional capacity for gathering
evidence and taking testimony far exceeds ours. By pass-
ing legislation, Congress indicates its conclusion, whether
explicitly or not, that facts support its exercise of the com-
merce power. The business of the courts is to review the
congressional assessment, not for soundness but simply for
the rationality of concluding that a jurisdictional basis
exists in fact. See ibid. Any explicit ﬁndings that Con-
gress chooses to make, though not dispositive of the ques-
tion of rationality, may advance judicial review by identi-
fying factual authority on which Congress relied. Applying
those propositions in these cases can lead to only one
conclusion.

One obvious difference from United States v. Lopez, 514
U. S. 549 (1995), is the mountain of data assembled by Con-

1 Finding the law a valid exercise of Commerce Clause power, I have
no occasion to reach the question whether it might also be sustained as an
exercise of Congress’s power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.