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Unit: $U54

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Cite as: 529 U. S. 598 (2000)

615

Opinion of the Court

In these cases, Congress’ ﬁndings are substantially weak-
ened by the fact that they rely so heavily on a method of
reasoning that we have already rejected as unworkable if we
are to maintain the Constitution’s enumeration of powers.
Congress found that gender-motivated violence affects inter-
state commerce

“by deterring potential victims from traveling inter-
state, from engaging in employment in interstate busi-
ness, and from transacting with business, and in places
involved in interstate commerce; . . . by diminishing na-
tional productivity, increasing medical and other costs,
and decreasing the supply of and the demand for inter-
state products.” H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103–711, at 385.

Accord, S. Rep. No. 103–138, at 54. Given these ﬁndings and
petitioners’ arguments, the concern that we expressed in
Lopez that Congress might use the Commerce Clause to
completely obliterate the Constitution’s distinction between
national and local authority seems well founded. See Lopez,
supra, at 564. The reasoning that petitioners advance seeks
to follow the but-for causal chain from the initial occurrence
of violent crime (the suppression of which has always been
the prime object of the States’ police power) to every attenu-
ated effect upon interstate commerce.
If accepted, petition-
ers’ reasoning would allow Congress to regulate any crime
as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact of that crime
has substantial effects on employment, production, transit,
Indeed, if Congress may regulate gender-
or consumption.
motivated violence, it would be able to regulate murder or
any other type of violence since gender-motivated violence,
as a subset of all violent crime, is certain to have lesser eco-
nomic impacts than the larger class of which it is a part.

Petitioners’ reasoning, moreover, will not limit Congress
to regulating violence but may, as we suggested in Lopez,
be applied equally as well to family law and other areas
of traditional state regulation since the aggregate effect of