Opinion ID: 774909
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Thing in Commerce

Text: 16 As the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear, Congress's power to regulate things in interstate commerce is plenary. 7 See Gibbons, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) at 193, 196 (explaining that the Commerce Clause comprehend[s] every species of commercial intercourse among the several states and that Congress's Commerce Clause power is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution). Among the reasons the nation's Founders imbued the national legislature with an explicit grant of power in Article I, §8, cl. 3 was to ensure that the Congress could regulate commerce that extended beyond an individual state's borders. See Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc., v. Town of Harrison, 520 U.S. 564, 571 (1997) (explaining, with respect to a dormant Commerce Clause challenge to a state statute, that [i]f there was any one object riding over every other in the adoption of the constitution, it was to keep the commercial intercourse among the States free from all invidious and partial restraints) (quoting Gibbons, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) at 231); cf. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 574 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (Congress can regulate in the commercial sphere on the assumption that we have a single market and a unified purpose to build a stable national economy.). Indeed, the Founders recognized that commerce that crossed state lines could exceed the states' capacity to regulate such commerce uniformly or to enforce the states' own laws. In United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass'n, the Supreme Court observed: 17 The power confined to Congress by the Commerce Clause is declared in The Federalist to be for the purpose of securing the 'maintenance of harmony and proper intercourse among the States.'... It is the power to legislate concerning transactions which, reaching across state boundaries, affect the people of more states than one; -- to govern affairs which the individual states, with their limited territorial jurisdictions, are not fully capable of governing. 18 United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass'n, 322 U.S. 533, 551-52 (1944) (footnotes omitted). 19 In exercising its positive Commerce Clause power, Congress has often passed legislation to help the States solve problems that defy local solution. Sage, 92 F.3d at 105. Thus, in Perez v. United States, 402 U.S. 146, 150 (1971), the Supreme Court noted that legislative history for the Consumer Credit Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. §891 et seq., which makes intrastate loan sharking activities a federal crime, reflected Congress's concern that loan sharking, a significant component of organizedcrime, was a national affliction and required a federal antidote because [t]he problem simply [could not] be solved by the States alone. Earlier, in United States v. Sheridan, 329 U.S. 379, 384 (1946), the Supreme Court explained that Congress passed the National Stolen Property Act, 18 U.S.C. §§413-19, to assist the states in detecting and punishing criminals whose offenses are complete under state law, but who utilize the channels of interstate commerce to make a successful get away and thus make the state's detecting and punitive processes impotent. 20 When Congress enacted the CSRA in 1992, legislative history reveals that it did so in response to a dilemma it considered national in scope and whose resolution had defied the authority of the individual states. The House Judiciary Committee, which authored a report accompanying the bill that became 18 U.S.C. §228, stated that the Committee had found that interstate collection of child support was the most difficult to enforce and accounted for an unacceptably high deficit in child support payments. H.R. Rep. No. 102-771, at 5-6 (1992). According to the report, approximately one-third of child support cases involve children whose non-custodial parent lives in a state different from the child and whose custodial parent must therefore rely on interstate payments of child support. Among this group relying on interstate payment, fifty-seven percent of the custodial parents reported receiving child support payments only occasionally, seldom or never. Id. at 5. After noting that at least 42 states have made willful failure to pay child support a crime, the report concluded that the ability of those states to enforce such laws outside their own boundaries is severely limited. Id. at 5-6. Indeed, the report found that even though most states had adopted the Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act, which was designed to deal with the extradition of defendants who failed to pay interstate child support, interstate extradition and enforcement in fact remains a tedious, cumbersome and slow method of collection. Id. at 6. 21 As this report makes plain, Congress's enactment of the CSRA was premised upon a paradigmatic use of its Commerce Clause power over things in commerce: to regulate national problems that confound state-by-state solution. As the Second Circuit noted: 22 All the Act does is enable the United States to help [the state] do what it could not do on its own, namely, enforce [the defendant's] obligation to send money from one State to another. Congress was not impotent to overcome the obstacles inherent in our Federal system to the enforcement of that obligation. 23 Sage, 92 F.3d at 105. 24 Therefore, pursuant to its authority to regulate things in interstate commerce, be they commercial or not, we believe that Congress may properly prohibit a non-custodial spouse from refusing to pay court-ordered child support when the child lives in another state. The CSRA is explicitly premised upon the non-custodial parent's unfulfilled court-ordered obligation to make an interstate money payment to the custodial parent. Importantly, [p]ayments stemming from a support obligation will usually travel in interstate commerce by mail, wire, or electronic transfer. Black, 125 F.3d at 460; cf. United States v. Owens, 159 F.3d 221, 226 (6th Cir. 1998) (upholding money laundering conviction under 18 U.S.C. §1956 and finding statute valid exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause authority under category two because use of federally insuredbanks and/or the transport of monies across state borders to facilitate the money laundering create a sufficient nexus to interstate commerce to allow application of §1956). The money payment, or its absence, which would travel through interstate commerce, is the thing which Congress may validly regulate. 25 It matters not, for purposes of the Constitution, whether the child support payment is a tangible thing. In South-Eastern Underwriters Ass'n, 322 U.S. at 546, in which the Supreme Court upheld Congress's authority to regulate interstate insurance contracts, the Court made clear that Congress can regulate traffic though it consist of intangibles. The Court also noted that transactions [may] be commerce though non-commercial; they may be commerce though illegal and sporadic, and though they do not utilize common carriers or concern the flow of anything more tangible than electrons and information. Id. at 549-550; see also Reno v. Condon, 528 U.S. 141, 148 (2000) (upholding Driver's Privacy Protection Act, which forbids the states from selling or releasing drivers' personal, identifying information, as valid regulation of thing in interstate commerce). 26 Moreover, it is immaterial that the CSRA regulates a defendant's failure to put a thing in commerce. 8 It is true that many federal statutes prohibit, rather than seek to compel, goods or services from passing through interstate commerce.See, e.g., United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 115 (1941) (upholding criminal provision of Fair Labor Standards Act proscribing interstate shipment of goods produced by employees whose wages and hours of employment did not conform to the Act). As the Fifth Circuit noted, however, [t]he Supreme Court has often held, in several contexts, that the defendant's nonuse of interstate channels alone does not shield him from federal purview under the Commerce Clause. Bailey, 115 F.3d at 1229-30; see also Sage, 92 F.3d at 105-06 (rejecting argument that failure to send money does not invoke Commerce Clause power because [i]f Congress can take measures under the Commerce Clause to foster potential interstate commerce, it surely has power to prevent the frustration of an obligation to engage in commerce). Thus, in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 257-58 (1964), the Supreme Court upheld Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides for equal access to places of public accommodation without regard to race, explaining that the Heart of Atlanta Motel's refusal to accommodate blacks was an impermissible obstruction to interstate commerce because it deterred blacks from engaging in interstate travel; in United States v. Green, 350 U.S. 415, 420 (1956), the Supreme Court upheld the Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. §1951, which makes illegal robbery or extortion that in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or affects commerce and thus removes obstacles to interstate commerce; and in Standard Oil Co. v. United States, 221 U.S. 1, 74 (1911), the Supreme Court upheld the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. §§1, 2, which makes illegal every contract, combination ... or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States andthereby furthers interstate commerce that otherwise would have been stifled. If Congress may validly restrict one industry's restraint on trade or prevent intrastate extortion because it obstructs the flow of interstate commerce, certainly Congress may regulate Faasse's failure to send payments from California to Michigan as a similar obstruction of interstate commerce. 9 27 The dissent's contention that Faasse passively failed to engage in commerce, instead of actively obstructed commerce, and that these precedents therefore do not apply to him, is not well taken. Faasse's failure to act was not passive in this case, it was willful, as he was under a state court order to pay child support which he deliberately disobeyed. Indeed, we note that the scienter element in the CSRA requires willfulness: the statute may only be invoked if a defendant willfully fails to pay a past due support obligation with respect to a child who resides in another State. 18 U.S.C. §228(a) (1994). When Faasse pleaded guilty, he acknowledged his guilt as to each and every element of the offense. Thus, by virtue of his guilty plea, Faasse conceded that his failure to pay child support was willful. We conclude that the distinction between active obstruction and passive failure is, in this case, illusory and we reject any attempt to hide behind it. 28 We are also nonplused by the assertion that, in some hypothetical situations, a debtor parent and the custodial parent may reside in one state while the minor child resides in another, thereby undermining the rationale for federal regulation. Although such a scenario is unlikely, we note that the debtor parent's payment must still travel through interstate commerce, thereby making use of the channels of commerce, to reach the child. Moreover, we do not strike down a statute facially because there are hypothetical situations in which the Act's interstate commerce connection may conceivably be tenuous. 10 See United States v. Valenzeno, 123 F.3d 365, 368 (6th Cir. 1997). 29 Finally, we wish to make clear that this statute does not, as Faasse and the dissent would have us believe, regulate a traditional area of family law best left to the states. In both Lopez and Morrison, the Supreme Court noted that should the substantial effects and aggregation principles for intrastate activity be extended too far, it would provide Congress with authority to regulate family law and other areas of traditional state regulation since the aggregate effect of marriage, divorce, and childrearing on the national economy is undoubtedly significant. Morrison, 120 S. Ct. at 1753. First, the CSRA does not rely exclusively upon either the substantial effects or aggregation principle for its constitutionality; asnoted above, it regulates inter-, not intra-state economic activity. Moreover, the statute does not purport to regulate the non-economic activities associated with marriage, divorce, or childrearing under the guise that, in the aggregate, such activities substantially affect interstate commerce. As a regulation of out-of-state debtors who owe court-ordered payments, the CSRA deals exclusively with interstate economic transactions. Cf. United States v. Napier, 233 F.3d 394, 402 (6th Cir. 2000) (upholding 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(8), criminalizing possession of a weapon that has traveled interstate while defendant is subject to domestic violence order, against claim that statute regulates traditional area of family law, because statute's jurisdictional element ensures it was enacted pursuant to Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce in firearms). Therefore, we are confident that the statute does not implicate the Court's concern that Congress may attempt to create federal family law under the pretext of its Commerce Clause power. 30 Second, the statute does not supplant traditional state statutory enforcement mechanisms. In this case, Michigan remains the exclusive regulator and enforcer of all unpaid child support obligations in its state unless the non-custodial parent (or the child) both lives out of state and the parent fails to make payments. In such a situation, Congress made express findings that collection of past-due debts had grown beyond the enforcement capacities of the states. The CSRA does not supplant or preempt state law because it does not implicate the states' ability or authority to order child support payments, nor does it compel states to enforce such orders. 11 Instead, the CSRA merely reinforces state laws which the states were unable to enforce themselves. 12 This is a most appropriate use of federal power. 13 See South-EasternUnderwriters Ass'n, 322 U.S. at 552 (noting that Commerce Clause power is a positive power ... to govern affairs which the individual states, with their limited territorial jurisdictions, are not fully capable of governing). 31 An interstate court-ordered child support payment clearly is a thing in interstate commerce. See Bailey, 115 F.3d at 1229 (The CSRA ... seeks to prevent the frustration of an interstate commercial transaction that otherwise would have occurred absent the defendant's dereliction. It is thus subject to federal control [under category two] for that reason.);Crawford, 115 F.3d at 1400 (finding that payments of child support on behalf of an out-of-state child, or the debts resulting from nonpayment, are things in interstate commerce); Bongiorno, 106 F.3d at 1032 (holding that [b]ecause child support orders that require a parent in one state to make payments to a person in another state are functionally equivalent to interstate contracts, such obligations are 'things' in interstate commerce) (internal citation omitted); Mussari, 95 F.3d at 790 (The obligation of a parent in one state to provide support for a child in a different state is an obligation to be met by a payment that will normally move in interstate commerce -- by mail, by wire, or by the electronic transfer of funds. That obligation is, therefore, a thing in interstate commerce and falls within the power of Congress to regulate.). Therefore, the Congress may freely regulate the interstate court-ordered child support payment, provided we find that the statute's means are rationally related to its ends, which we do. Thus, we conclude that the CSRA represents an appropriate exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause power.