Source: http://democracythemepark.org/why-a-green-future-is-unconstitutional/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 00:47:17+00:00

Document:
No out-of-state water sales without the approval of the state legislature. That’s how Texas put it in a law passed in 1965. Nebraska’s 1978 law permitted water sales to an adjacent state only if a reciprocity agreement was in place.
Both laws were important steps toward protection of local resources. Steps that might have paved the way for a more self-conscious bioregional awareness, perhaps even a realization that treating water as a commodity is as short-sighted as treating an ecosystem like a factory.
A federal court declared the Texas law unconstitutional in 1966; the Supreme Court declared the Nebraska law unconstitutional in 1982.2 Such declarations send a “chill” to any other states or localities that already have, or are considering, similar laws. The take-home message: don’t even think that you who live there can control local resources.
Fearing the consequences of becoming the “toxic waste dump of the nation,” in 1989 Alabama tightened requirements for waste entering its Emelle waste facility, the largest commercially licensed hazardous waste dump in the US.
The commonsensical measures were reminiscent of rules I recall from my high school chemistry lab. Keep an inventory. Sort and label everything. Don’t mix things together that might explode, or produce dangerous new compounds. Don’t play around with “mystery” ingredients.
In Michigan, people sought to improve and clean up their handling of “regular” garbage. A 1978 law encouraged locals to reduce their waste stream, re-use, and recycle. Why penalize conscientious people for their responsible waste practices by making them accept crud from oblivious uber-consumers elsewhere? To prevent Michigan’s safer, more slowly filling landfills from becoming destination sites for sloppy mixed trash from faraway places, potential garbage donors were limited to those with standards comparable to Michigan’s.
Prospects for a greener future dim when courts can use the unconstitutional label to deny state efforts to inform consumers about products they purchase.
Once you get used to the idea that water conservation, responsible waste handling, and state product labeling requirements are “unconstitutional,” perhaps it’s easier to accept that prudent management of energy is, too.
Every law mentioned above was declared a “trade barrier” — a violation of the commerce clause of the US Constitution9 –and therefore void. The commerce clause “trade barrier” doctrine has been helping corporations escape restrictive laws since the 1870s. But the commerce clause is just one among many malleable Constitutional clauses. Hundreds of other promising green or greenish laws have been declared unconstitutional under other Constitutional “doctrines” jointly crafted over generations by corporate lawyers and federal judges.
After the Supreme Court awarded the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection, due process, and “privileges and immunities” protections to corporate “persons” (corporations), corporate lawyers lined up with satchels stuffed with laws to be voided. The Supreme Court dutifully complied.
Every voiding of a green law, under whatever Constitutional doctrine, casts a chill across the land against similar laws. Each invalidation insures greater power and profits for the corporations seeking to stamp out unwelcome regulation. Each such law thrown onto history’s waste dump might have slowed some of the destruction, preserved some of the resources, and heartened the “greens” of past generations.
Sad as it is, it is also encouraging and even inspiring to read through the many green laws that have been thrown out under Constitutional “doctrines” concocted by corporate lawyers to escape government regulation. It is a reminder that there have always been people who recognized the injustice of social systems, and the idiocy of heedless resource extraction. Unfortunately, they were rarely the ones writing the laws in the statehouses, and almost never the ones wearing the robes in the courts.
The Constitution is not without its flaws, but most of the potentially green laws thrown out as unconstitutional were defeated by specific and usually convoluted pro-corporate interpretations of Constitutional clauses. The Supreme Court, with corporate assistance, devises these interpretations, known as doctrines.
The Congress has enormous power over the Supreme Court. Most of the high court’s power comes not from the Constitution, but from the Judiciary Acts of 1789, 1825, and 1875, and subsequent amendments. The discretion granted by Congressional Acts is now so broad that there is almost no case that the Supreme Court must take, and almost none that the high court cannot “call up” for review. Thus, today, the nine members of the Supreme Court essentially have veto power over every law passed in the US. Without altering or violating the Constitution, the Congress could dramatically limit the Supreme Court’s power to annul state and local laws.
Congress could also tack onto federal legislation the clarification that their laws set minimum standards: floors, not ceilings. It could specifically affirm that states and localities are encouraged to exceed federal minimums, to set higher standards, to be the “laboratories of democracy” that Justice Louis Brandeis lauded. This clarification would constrain the creativity of federal courts in declaring green laws unconstitutional.
So, the road to removing many of the Constitutional doctrines that are obstacles to a greener future definitively goes through the halls of Congress. But it will probably have to visit the courts as well.
Corporate lawyers have become adept over the last century at setting up test cases to get green-leaning laws declared unconstitutional. They have a shelf of boilerplate arguments that have worked time and time again. Each argument uses a clause of the Constitution — the commerce clause, the Fourteenth Amendment, others I have mentioned — to anchor assertions that such things as resource protection, product labeling, conservation, consumer protection, worker safety, and public health are unconstitutional. Green activists can join test cases set up by corporations and their trade groups, or they can set up their own.
There is no magic model that will take care of this massive problem. Pro-corporate Constitutional doctrines — each as devastating as “separate but equal” — have been built up over generations. Like “separate but equal,” they need to be eliminated. As with “separate but equal,” elimination of them first requires knowledge and understanding of them. This doesn’t mean that we all need to become legal scholars. It does mean that, like the courageous people who wanted to pick their own seats on buses or have coffee at drugstore counters, we must be aware of the problem.
We won’t be in shape to petition Congress, or to mount test cases, until we understand the way the Constitution has been used to frustrate the people’s repeated legislative efforts to go green. More than anything, this understanding requires an attitude change.
If they’re well-briefed, and even bother to answer, they will respond by mumbling the legalese “commerce clause” or “due process” or some such, and expect you to back off. Ask “How’s that?” and you will have gone further than most people on the green band of the spectrum have gone for some time.
When a green law is declared unconstitutional, that event is a data point, not an end point. Those who oppose a green future do not quit when they lose a case. Their game plan, like a coin, has two sides. Heads is the issue. (This is where they explain that a) chemical X has no environmental or health effects, b) the effects are within legal limits, and c) even if there were effects, they are totally safe, even good for you!). Tails is the cluster of Constitutional arguments that they will use, as they have for many generations, to convince federal judges that the measure is unconstitutional. This dual strategy–issue-plus-doctrine–has served them well.
While we are honking for peace and practicing our three-minute speeches for regulatory hearings, corporate lawyers are just taking the same old arguments off the shelf that have been working, for the most part, for a century or more. Our campaigns, too, need to address both heads (the issue) and tails (the Constitutional doctrines) surrounding whatever problem we are working on.
We need not act like there is an invisible force field around the Constitutional doctrines that protect corporations. States and municipalities defending green laws over many generations have already devised forceful and eloquent arguments against the pro-corporate doctrines increasingly accepted by the courts. These arguments, too, are “on the shelf,” right alongside the twisted pro-corporate doctrines strangling our chance at a green future. They are available to anyone willing to take them up and build a movement around them.
Supreme Court cases are identified by name and year only. Other court cases are given the full standard legal citation. References to laws mentioned here can be found in the court cases that declared them unconstitutional.
City of Altus, Okla. v. Carr, 255 F.Supp. 828 (1966); Sporhase v. Nebraska (1982).
In the first case, Nat’l Solid Waste Management v. Alabama, 910 F. 2d 713 (1990), a lower federal court did the declaring. By refusing to review it, the Supreme Court essentially approved the ruling. (Cert. denied in Alabama Dept. of Environmental Management v. Nat’l Solid Waste Management Assn. (1991)). The second case, Chemical Waste Management. v. Hunt (1992), was heard by the Supreme Court.
The first case was Fort Gratiot Sanitary Landfill, Inc. v. Michigan Dept. of Nat. Res. (1992). The second case was Nat’l Solid Wastes Mgmt. Assn. v. Charter County of Wayne, 303 F. Supp. 2d 835 (2004).
Philadelphia v. New Jersey (1978); Mullis Tree Service Inc. v. Bibb County, Ga., 822 F. Supp. 738 (M.D. Ga. 1993); Waste Mgmt. Holdings v. Gilmore, 87 F. Supp. 2d 536, E.D.Va. 2000.
Baking soda, In re: Ware, C.C. Minn. (1892), 53 F. 783; syrup, McDermott v. Wisconsin (1913); meat, Short v. Ness Produce Co. (1967); cantaloupes, Pike v. Bruce Church, Inc. (1970); tobacco, Philip Morris Inc. v. Reilly, 113 F.Supp. 2d 129 (2000).
West (Okla. A.G.) v. Kansas Nat. Gas Co. (1911); Penn. v. West Virginia (1923); New England Power Co. v. New Hampshire (1982).
Discussion of hundreds of examples can be found in Jane Anne Morris, Gaveling Down the Rabble: How “Free Trade” is Stealing Our Democracy (Apex Press, 2008). The cases involving the “chain store” laws were: Fargo v. Stevens (1887); Leloup v. Port of Mobile (1888); Fargo v. Hart (1904); Ludwig v. Western Union Tel. Co. (1910); Atchison, T. & S.F. Ry. v. O’Connor (1912); Looney v. Crane Co. (1917); N. J. Bell Tel. Co. v. State Board (1930). State and local efforts to protect their economies against things like chain stores and “big box” stores continued, but tended to use more indirect means, such as zoning details or parts-per-million regulations. Corporate strategies also evolved, often using the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses, or other corporate constitutional “rights,” to force their way into communities.
The Congress shall have power… to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes. Article I, Section 8, Clause 3.
Bradwell v. The State (1873); Minor v. Happersett (1875).
Santa Clara County v. So. Pac. Railroad (1886) (equal protection); Pembina Mining Co. v. Penn. (1888) (privileges and immunities); Minneapolis & St. Louis Ry. Co. v. Beckwith (1889) (both equal protection and due process).
Among them are the contracts clause, and the supremacy clause. For an excellent discussion and summary of corporations’ Constitutional protections, see Carl J. Mayer, “Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights,” Hastings Law Journal, vol. 41(1990), pp. 577-667.
George D. Braden, “Umpire to the Federal system,” 10 Univ. of Chicago Law Rev. 27 (1942-3).

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.