Court Opinion

ID: 9426478
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:06.287966+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:01.183626
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
concurring.
The dissent creates the impression that the Court’s opinion, which I join without reservation, represents a significant retreat from its settled practice in adjudicat*815ing claims that a state program places an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce. This is not the fact. There is no prior decision of this Court even addressing the critical Commerce Clause issue presented by this case.
It is important to differentiate between commerce which flourishes in a free market and commerce which owes its existence to a state subsidy program. Our cases finding that a state regulation constitutes an impermissible burden on interstate commerce all dealt with restrictions that adversely affected the operation of a free market. This case is unique because the commerce which Maryland has “burdened” is commerce which would not exist if Maryland had not decided to subsidize a portion of the automobile scrap-processing business.
By artificially enhancing the value of certain abandoned hulks, Maryland created a market that did not previously exist.* The program which Maryland initiated in 1969 included subsidies for scrapping plants located in Virginia and Pennsylvania as well as for plants located in Maryland. Those subsidies stimulated the movement of abandoned hulks from Maryland to out-of-state scrapping plants and thereby gave rise to the interstate commerce which is at stake in this litigation.
That commerce, which is now said to be burdened, would never have existed if in the first instance Maryland had decided to confine its subsidy to operators of Maryland plants. A failure to create that commerce would have been unobjectionable because the Commerce Clause surely does not impose on the States any obliga*816tion to subsidize out-of-state business. Nor, in my judgment, does that Clause inhibit a State's power to experiment with different methods of encouraging local industry. Whether the encouragement takes the form of a cash subsidy, a tax credit, or a special privilege intended to attract investment capital, it should not be characterized as a “burden” on commerce. Accordingly, the program in effect in Maryland since 1974 could hardly have been challenged if it had been adopted in 1969.
Since Maryland did subsidize Virginia and Pennsylvania plants from 1969 to 1974, it is easy to describe the elimination of the out-of-state subsidy as a burden on interstate commerce. Indeed, we may assume that the temporarily subsidized interstate business has now been totally eliminated. It does not follow, however, that such a “burden” is impermissible.
Unquestionably Maryland could terminate its entire program, discontinuing subsidy payments to Maryland operators as well as out-of-state firms, without offending the Constitution. Since, by hypothesis, we are dealing with a business that is dependent on the availability of subsidy payments, such a complete termination of Maryland’s program would have precisely the same effect on the out-of-state plants as the partial termination effected in 1974. The “burden” on the Virginia processor is caused by the nonreceipt of the subsidy, regardless of whether or not Maryland elects to continue to subsidize its local plants. It follows, I believe, that the constitutional issue presented by the 1974 amendment is the same as the question which would have arisen if Maryland had never made the subsidy available to out-of-state concerns.
This is the first case in which any litigant has asked a federal court to address the question whether a state *817subsidy constitutes a “burden” on interstate commerce. That fact is significant because there must have been countless situations during the past two centuries in which the several States have experimented with different methods of encouraging local enterprise without providing like encouragement to out-of-state competitors. The absence of any previous challenge to such programs reflects, I believe, a common and correct interpretation of the Commerce Clause as primarily intended (at least when Congress has not spoken) to inhibit the several States’ power to create restrictions on the free flow of goods within the national market, rather than to provide the basis for questioning a State’s right to experiment with different incentives to business. The District Court’s novel interpretation of the “burden” concept represented a departure which, had it been accepted, would impair rather than protect interstate commerce.

It might be more accurate to state that Maryland substantially enlarged the market that was previously too small to be significant. But the analysis is the same whether we are dealing with the newly created portion of a pre-existing market or with an entirely new market.