Opinion ID: 770530
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Constitutional Balance of Federalism

Text: 28 The Supreme Court has observed that when Congress criminalizes conduct already denounced as criminal by the States, it effects a 'change in the sensitive relation between federal and state criminal jurisdiction'. United States v. Lopez, 574 U.S. 549, 563 n.3, (quoting United States v. Enmons, 410 U.S. 396, 411-12 (1973)). Ironically, it may be that state power suffers greater disruption when Congress criminalizes conduct that the States have chosen not to criminalize but to regulate in a different fashion, for the federal law assigns to the conduct new costs that differ not just in quantum, but in kind, from the costs defined by the State. Such is the case here. 29 Although Michigan has a felony desertion statute on its books, it is rarely enforced and, in any case, it does not link criminal liability to judicial child support orders. See Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 750.161 (West 1991) (providing liability for refusing to provide necessary and proper shelter, food, care, and clothing for . . . his or her children under 17 years of age). Civil child support enforcement methods account for virtually all enforcement activity in Michigan. Scott G. Bassett, Family Law, Annual Survey of Michigan Law June 1, 1990-May 31, 1991, 38 Wayne L. Rev. 1045, 1070 (1992). Michigan Law commits to the discretion of state judges the means by which to enforce--or to deter failure to obey--a support order. A circuit court judge may incarcerate a person for child nonsupport, but this remedy is civil in nature. See Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 552.635; Mead v. Batchlor, 460 N.W.2d 493, 500 n.15 (Mich. 1990) (Clearly, it was intended that the Michigan statutory procedure authorizing incarceration for child nonsupport should be regarded as civil in nature.). Furthermore, the judge's discretion in this regard is carefully cabined; an order of incarceration may be entered only if other remedies--such as income withholding, interception of tax refunds, and property liens--appear unlikely to correct the payer's failure or refusal to paysupport. Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 552.637(1). 30 The CSRA disrupts this delicate scheme. By creating a federal criminal penalty/deterrent for disobedience of support orders in some circumstances, the Act renders nugatory the discretion invested in Michigan circuit court judges. Moreover, these judges are subject to election, see Mich. Const. art 6, § 11, and the contours of their discretion are determined by an elected legislature; the CSRA thus prevents Michigan officials from regulating in accordance with the views of the local electorate. See New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 168-69 (1992) (noting that where Congress encourages state regulation rather than compelling it, state officials remain accountable to the people, but that accountability is diminished when, due to federal interference, elected state officials cannot regulate in accordance with the view of the local electorate in matters not pre-empted by federal regulation). In essence, the Act carves up Michigan law by predicating liability on violations of Michigan court orders, but putting deterrence and penalty decisions into the hands of United States officials in that minority of cases in which the state of residence of the payer is different from that of the child. 31 This federal legislative choice is particularly unsettling given that Congressional power to disturb state regulatory programs has customarily been thought to fall into three categories, into none of which the CSRA comfortably fits. Congress may, pursuant to its spending power, influence a State's regulatory decisions by attaching conditions to the receipt of federal funds. See South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 206 (1987). Congress may also craft programs of cooperative federalism that offer a State the choice of regulating according to federal standards or having state law pre-empted by federal regulation. See Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Ass'n, 452 U.S. 264, 288-89 (1981). Finally, Congress may, of course, pre-empt outright state laws regulating private activity that otherwise fall within the enumerated powers of the Constitution. See Rice v. Santa Fe Elevator Corp., 331 U.S. 218 (1947). 32 In enacting the CSRA, Congress has followed none of these well-trodden paths. Although the Act does authorize grants to States to coordinate interstate child support enforcement effort, see 42 U.S.C.A. § 3796cc (West 1994), these monies are not tethered to the criminal provisions of the legislation. The States' ability to assign social and other costs to the disobedience of child support orders is emasculated regardless of whether they accept federal funds. Similarly, the States have no choice between devising remedies within minimum federal standards or having their child support laws pre-empted. Indeed, the CSRA creates no pre-emption issue; the Act is founded on the existence of state court orders, not their displacement. By piggybacking a criminal sanction on Michigan child support orders, the CSRA recognizes the primacy of the State's laws at the same time that it expressly overrides portions of such laws. 33 The Constitution diffuses power to protect the citizenry against just such attempts to fragment official action from political accountability. See The Federalist No. 51, at 323 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1969) (In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments control each other, at the same time that each is controlled by itself.) Among the structural protections of the Constitution is the doctrine of enumerated powers, and the Commerce Clause figures prominently among these. Although judicial efforts tomaintain the federal balance through exposition of the Commerce Clause have taken some turns, Oklahoma Tax Comm'n v. Jefferson Lines, Inc., 514 U.S. 175, 180 (1995), the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed in United States v. Lopez that there are some activities that States may regulate but Congress may not.
34 In Lopez, the Supreme Court struck down the Gun Free School Zones Act, 18 U.S.C. § 922(q)(1)(A), which prohibited  'any individual knowingly to possess a firearm at a place [he] knows ... is a school zone,'  as an unconstitutional exercise of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 551 (1995). That power, the Court observed, only extends to only three types of activity: (1) the use of the channels of interstate commerce; (2) the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce; and (3) those activities having a substantial relation to interstate commerce, namely, those activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Id. at 558- 59. Since § 922(q)(1)(A) did not involve channels or instrumentalities of interstate commerce, the Court reasoned that the statute would be constitutional only if it qualified under the third category, as a statute that regulated an activity which substantially affected interstate commerce. Id. at 559. 35 In considering that question, the Court recognized that its case law had not always been clear as to whether an activity must affect or substantially affect interstate commerce. The Court then explained that consistent with the great weight of our case law ... the proper test requires an analysis of whether the regulated activity 'substantially affects' interstate commerce. Id. at 559. Having clarified that point, the Court concluded that several critical factors prevented § 922(q)(1)(A) from qualifying as a valid exercise of congressional authority under the third category. First, since § 922(q)(1)(A) did not regulate a commercial activity, the statute could not be upheld as regulating activities that arise out of or are connected with a commercial transaction, which viewed in the aggregate, substantially affects interstate commerce. Id. at 561. Further, the statute contained no jurisdictional element which would ensure, through case-by-case inquiry, that the [activity] in question affects interstate commerce. Id. Finally, the statute was not supported by specific congressional findings [that] would enable [the Court] to evaluate the legislative judgment that the activity in question substantially affected interstate commerce, even though no such substantial effect was visible to the naked eye. Id. at 563. 36 It has been argued that the CSRA falls within all three Lopez categories. Because payment of child support on behalf of an out-of-state child will normally require the use of channels of interstate commerce, one argument goes, the CSRA is constitutional under the first Lopez category. See, e.g., United States v. Crawford, 115 F.3d 1397, 1400 (8th Cir. 1997). Another thesis likens child support obligations to interstate debts or contracts, and asserts that Congress's authority to prevent obstruction of interstate commerce empowers it to criminalize nonpayment. See, e.g., United States v. Bongiorno, 106 F.3d 1027, 1032 (1st Cir. 1997); United States v. Sage, 92 F.3d 101, 105-06 (2d Cir. 1996). Yet a third maintains that because the obligations covered by the CSRA, in the aggregate, total billions of dollars, the Act regulates an activity that substantially affects interstate commerce. See, e.g., United States v. Parker, 108 F.3d 28, 30-31 (3d Cir. 1997). Any of these theories would permit the creation of a federal law of ordinary private debt, whenever one party moved out of state after the debt wascreated. We find each of these arguments unpersuasive. 37 We admit to some confusion with respect to the notion that the CSRA regulates the use of the channels of interstate commerce. The term channel of interstate commerce refers to, inter alia, navigable rivers, lakes, and canals of the United States; the interstate railroad track system; the interstate highway system; . . . interstate telephone and telegraph lines; air traffic routes; television and radio broadcast frequencies. Gibbs v. Babbitt, 214 F.3d 483, 490-91 (4th Cir. 2000) (alteration in original) (internal quotation marks omitted). Congress has broad authority with respect to these channels; not only may the Legislature regulate them directly, it may act to keep them free from immoral and injurious uses. Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470, 491 (1917). But Congress does not act pursuant to this authority when it regulates an activity that merely implicates or invokes the use of the channels of interstate commerce. Cf. United States v. Bailey, 115 F.3d 1222, 1227 (5th Cir. 1997). Thus, we held in United States v. Abdullah that the ban on trafficking in contraband cigarettes found at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2341-46 does not fall within the first Lopez category because the purpose of the ban is not to keep open the very avenues by which interstate commerce is transacted. Abdullah, 162 F.3d 897, 901 (6th Cir. 1998). Indeed, to hold otherwise would be to collapse the first and second Lopez categories; any regulation of a thing in interstate commerce would necessarily be a regulation of the use of the channels of interstate commerce. Because we assume that the Supreme Court did not idly draw the distinctions that it did, we cannot agree that the CSRA regulates the channels of interstate commerce merely by criminalizing the failure to make support payments which, if made, would normally enter the flow of interstate commerce. 38 Similarly unpersuasive is the argument that the CSRA regulates a thing in interstate commerce. This contention relies on an analogy between child support obligations and interstate debts, and on the further supposition that Congress may compel payment of debts through its power to prevent obstruction of interstate commerce. We find neither half of this contention compelling. Accepting for the moment the rickety analogy between support obligations and debts, (although, as we demonstrate below, support obligations in fact have no commercial character at all) we know of no case that holds that Congress has plenary authority to regulate a debt merely because the obligor and obligee reside in different states. Adherents of this theory rely on such pre-Lopez cases as Dahnke-Walker Milling Co. v. Bondurant, 257 U.S. 282 (1921), and Allenberg Cotton Co. v. Pittman, 419 U.S. 20 (1974). In these cases, the parties executed contracts for the sale of goods that were to be performed within the territorial limits of a particular state, but which contemplated that the goods would enter the flow of interstate commerce. When these contracts were breached, the defendants asserted as a defense state laws prescribing conditions on which foreign corporations might do business in the state of contract. The Supreme Court held that these business qualification laws, as applied, violated the Dormant Commerce Clause, saying we think the transaction was in interstate commerce. Dahnke-Walker, 257 U.S. at 292. Tempting though it may be to apply this snippet in an analysis under Lopez's second category, the Supreme Court itself has acknowledged that the clear import of Dahnke-Walker and Allenberg Cotton is that a State has no power to prevent an engagement in interstate commerce within her limits, except by her leave. Sonneborn Bros. v. Cureton, 262 U.S. 506, 514 (1923). These cases in no way suggest that the federal legislature hasregulatory jurisdiction with respect to the conduct of contracting parties on the basis of mere diversity of residency. See United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass'n, 322 U.S. 533, 545 (1944) (emphasizing that legal formulae devised to assess state power cannot uncritically be accepted as trustworthy guides to determine Congressional power under the Commerce Clause). 39 Even if they did so suggest, still another obstacle stands in the way of the hypothesis that the CSRA regulates a thing in interstate commerce. Simply put, defendants in CSRA cases do not put something into the flow of interstate commerce; rather, they refuse to do so. It has been argued that this refusal amounts to an obstruction of interstate commerce, which Congress has authority to prevent. See, e.g., United States v. Mussari, 95 F.3d 787, 790 (9th Cir. 1996). We would agree that Congress has power to remove impediments to interstate commerce. Thus, Congress may prohibit racial discrimination that obstructs the flow of interstate commerce, see Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 253 (1964) (upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1964), prohibit violent actions that interfere with interstate commerce, see United States v. Green, 350 U.S. 415, 420 (1956) (upholding the Hobbs Act), and prohibit restraints of trade that obstruct interstate commerce, see Standard Oil Co. v. United States, 221 U.S. 1, 68 (1911) (upholding the Sherman Act). But this line of cases deals with active obstruction of the flow of interstate commerce; it does not stand for the more radical proposition that Congress is empowered to regulate the passive failure of individuals to engage in interstate commerce. Bailey, 115 F.3d at 1239 n.15 (Smith, J., dissenting). More importantly, the obstruction argument conflates the Lopez categories. A prohibition on obstruction of commerce does not regulate a thing in commerce, nor does obstruction constitute a use of the channels of interstate commerce under the common meaning of use. Id. Rather, Congress has authority to prohibit activities that interfere with commerce because those activities, taken in the aggregate, substantially affect commerce. The CSRA must therefore stand or fall, like the Gun Free School Zones Act, as a regulation under Lopez's final category. 40 As discussed earlier, the Gun Free School Zones Act could not be sustained as a regulation of an activity that substantially affects interstate commerce for three reasons. Section 922(q) was a criminal statute that, by its terms, had nothing to do with any sort of economic enterprise; it contained no jurisdictional element that would have ensured, through case by case inquiry, that the activity in question affected interstate commerce; and it was passed without findings elaborating the link between the activity criminalized and interstate commerce. Lopez, 514 U.S at 561-63. The CSRA fails constitutional muster for precisely these same reasons. 41 The activity criminalized by the CSRA is not commercial in nature. The most widely accepted general description of commerce is that given in Gibbons v. Ogden: Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more--it is intercourse. It describes the commercial intercourse between nations, and parts of nations in all its branches . . . . Gibbons, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1, 189-90 (1824). As Judge Jerry Smith has pointed out, intercourse has as its distinguishing feature a notion of reciprocity. Bailey, 115 F.3d at 1236 (Smith, J., dissenting); see also Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language 733, 734 (2d ed. 1972) (defining intercourse as communication or dealings between or among people, countries, etc.: interchange of products, services, ideas, feelings, etc., and interchange as to give and take mutually; exchange . . . to put (each of two things) in the other's place. . . .). Thiselement of reciprocity--the mutual exchange of value motivated by economic self-interest--defines the marketplace which fosters social wealth. See Michael Klausner, Corporations, Corporate Law, and Networks of Contracts, 81 Va. L. Rev 757, 771 (1995) (noting the basic precept of welfare economics that competitive market forces optimize social wealth). And it is the wealth-creating aspect of markets that justifies a national commerce power in our federal system; as the Supreme Court reminds us, the overriding requirement of the Commerce Clause is a national common market. Hunt v. Washington State Adver. Comm'n, 432 U.S. 333, 350 (1977); see also Hughes v. Alexandria Scrap Corp., 426 U.S. 794, 803 (1976) (noting the premise, well established by the history of the Commerce Clause, that this nation is a common market). 42 The failure to obey a state court order, of course, lacks this essential feature of reciprocity. This is so even where the order mandates a transfer of wealth, as do child support orders. [P]ayment of child support is not conditioned on the performance of a reciprocal duty by the obligee, nor does it benefit the obligor. Bailey, 115 F.3d at 1236 (Smith, J., dissenting). Due to this unilateral, allocative character, support obligations can influence the national common market only at the margins, if at all. Indeed, the right to support payments is not freely alienable and, in some instances, the payments must be made to the State rather than directly to the ultimate beneficiary, further depriving them of potential to affect the market. See, e.g., Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 552.452 (providing for payment of support to the office of the Michigan friend of the court). As a result, court-ordered wealth transfers to or from Michigan residents are not per se a fit object of the federal Commerce Power. 43 Despite the distinctly noncommercial nature of child support orders generally, there might exist a discrete set of failures to satisfy support obligations that have an explicit connection with or effect on interstate commerce. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 562. Had the CSRA an express jurisdictional element which might limit its reach to those failures, the Act might withstand constitutional scrutiny. Id. It does not. To be sure, the CSRA has a jurisdictional hook: the obligor parent and beneficiary child must reside in different States. 18 U.S.C. § 228(a). But this requirement will not ensure, through case-by-case inquiry, that a given failure to pay affects interstate commerce. As an initial matter, it would seem that the CSRA will inevitably govern some purely intrastate transactions. To take an extreme example, a child might move to a State different from that of her divorced parents after attaining her majority. If her non-custodial parent were in arrears, he could presumably be prosecuted under the Act, even though the relationship that created the obligation had no interstate character at all, and even though the payments to the former custodial parent, if made, would not cross state lines. See Sage, 92 F.3d at 106 (coupling this hypothetical with the questionable observation that the government would not likely invoke the Act where the State could enforce its own order). 44 More significantly, by effectively predicating jurisdiction on mere diversity of residency, the Act regulates every interstate obligation, without exception. Bailey, 115 F.3d at 1238 (Smith, J., dissenting). But, as we have already shown, child support obligations are not commercial in character. In the absence of a mechanism that would link particular support obligations to some sort of economic enterprise, sustaining the constitutionality of the CSRA on the basis of its current jurisdictional nexus would require paring the Interstate Commerce Clause to the Interstate Clause. See id. This, of course, we cannot do. 45 The manner in which the activity regulated by the CSRA substantially affects interstate commerce is therefore opaque. [T]o the extent that congressional findings would enable us to evaluate the legislative judgment that the failure to satisfy child support obligations substantially affects interstate commerce, they are lacking here. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 563. It is possible to infer from the legislative history that approximately $1.6 billion in interstate child support obligations go unpaid annually, and that Congress believed that some families were driven to federal public assistance as a result of unpaid child support. See H.R. Rep. 102-771, at 5 (1992) (observing that $5 billion in support obligations are not met each year, and that approximately one-third of child support cases concern children whose fathers live in a different state). These observations do not amount to a congressional conclusion that unpaid child support substantially affects interstate commerce, however, and we would not accept that conclusion based on such findings in any event. See United States v. Morrison, 120 S. Ct. 1740, 1752 (2000) (noting that whether particular operations affect interstate commerce sufficiently to come under the constitutional power of Congress to regulate them is ultimately a judicial rather than a legislative question). 46 First, the mere fact that the aggregate social costs of an activity come to a large dollar figure cannot, without more, satisfy the jurisdictional requirement that the activity have a substantial relationship to interstate commerce. See id. at 1754. The notion that the commerce power includes regulation of activities that are connected with a commercial transaction which, viewed in the aggregate, substantially affects interstate commerce stems from Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 128 (1942), perhaps the most far reaching example of Commerce Clause authority. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 560. But the Supreme Court has made clear that Wickard applies to laws that are an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity, in which the regulatory scheme could be undercut unless the intrastate activity were regulated. Id. at 561. Such is not the case here. The CSRA does not treat a situation involving the aggregate effect of potential market participants' refusing to participate in commerce--in no small part because child support orders are not commercial. Moreover, we have considerable doubt that, as a factual matter, court-ordered transfers of wealth from one State to another affect interstate commerce. In the aggregate, any given state should have about as much money from support payments leaving its borders as entering. See Recent Case, 110 Harv. L. Rev. 965, 968 (1997). Thus, the amount of goods bought in each state relative to other states should be basically unchanged, and interstate commerce left unaffected. Id. 47 Likewise, federal regulatory jurisdiction cannot be founded on the possibility that nonpayment of support orders might cause individual citizens to become dependent on programs funded with federal money. Taken to its logical conclusion, this reasoning would allow Congress to regulate activity of any person that depletes another person's assets and, at bottom, is no different from the costs of crime and national productivity arguments already rejected by the Supreme Court. See Lopez, 514 U.S. at 563-68. What the Court said in Lopez holds true here as well: To uphold the[se] contentions . . . , we would have to pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States. Id. at 567. Accordingly, we conclude that the CSRA is not a valid regulation of interstate commerce under Lopez's third and final category.