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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Souter, J., dissenting

Amendments that alter the balance of power between
the National and State Governments, like the Fourteenth,
or that change the way the States are represented within
the Federal Government, like the Seventeenth, are not rips
in the fabric of the Framers’ Constitution, inviting judicial
repairs. The Seventeenth Amendment may indeed have
lessened the enthusiasm of the Senate to represent the
States as discrete sovereignties, but the Amendment did
not convert the judiciary into an alternate shield against
the commerce power.

C

The Court’s choice to invoke considerations of traditional
state regulation in these cases is especially odd in light of
a distinction recognized in the now-repudiated opinion for
the Court in Usery.
In explaining that there was no in-
consistency between declaring the States immune to the
commerce power exercised in the Fair Labor Standards Act,
but subject to it under the Economic Stabilization Act of
1970, as decided in Fry v. United States, 421 U. S. 542 (1975),
the Court spoke of the latter statute as dealing with a se-
rious threat affecting all the political components of the fed-

of inﬂuence for politics than the Framers would have envisioned. Politics
has legitimate authority, for all of us on both sides of the disagreement,
only within the legitimate compass of the commerce power. The majority
claims merely to be engaging in the judicial task of patrolling the outer
boundaries of that congressional authority. See ante, at 616–617, n. 7.
That assertion cannot be reconciled with our statements of the substantial
effects test, which have not drawn the categorical distinctions the majority
favors. See, e. g., Wickard, 317 U. S., at 125; United States v. Darby, 312
U. S. 100, 118–119 (1941). The majority’s attempt to circumscribe the
commerce power by deﬁning it in terms of categorical exceptions can only
be seen as a revival of similar efforts that led to near tragedy for the
Court and incoherence for the law.
If history’s lessons are accepted as
guides for Commerce Clause interpretation today, as we do accept them,
then the subject matter of the Act falls within the commerce power and
the choice to legislate nationally on that subject, or to except it from na-
tional legislation because the States have traditionally dealt with it, should
be a political choice and only a political choice.