Court Opinion

ID: 9495563
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:05:43.105534+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:05.218536
License: Public Domain

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the dissent from the judgment affirming conviction, with whom GARWOOD, E. GRADY JOLLY and DeMOSS, Circuit Judges, join:
For a second time this court has been unable to agree upon the bite of recent Supreme Court interpretations of the Commerce Clause. This should be no surprise. We are left adrift by a statute whose reach is at best no more fixed than a property line set at the latest low tide mark of an ocean tributary.
There is some certainty. The Supreme Court has turned away from the New Deal view that the reach of the Commerce Clause is to be largely defined by the political process. But the path it will follow and how far it will go are undecided. In turn, the respective roles of Congress and the courts in this enterprise remain uncertain. Add the Hobbs Act’s unique effort to define its reach by proscribing all robberies over which there is federal jurisdiction — a wholly tautological statement made at the zenith of the judiciary’s abandonment of the commerce field to the Congress — and we are left with three choices. We can take the Hobbs Act as a congressional punt and decide it ourselves, we can leave it to the political process, or we can invoke the dialogic process of the doctrine of clear statement. The first two options describe this court’s division. Our court’s impasse leads me to state the case for the third path. At the least, it will make plain the division of this court. In describing this path, I need not retreat from the view expressed for half of our court in Hickman and so ably defended in Judge Garwood’s opinion, again for one half of our court.
I
With the developing case law since Hickman, there is a step that principles of judicial restraint offer this inferior court before it decides if Congress has the authority under the Commerce Clause to make a federal crime of local robberies such as those before us here. It could insist that Congress first do what it has not done — make clear its purpose to reach the wholly intrastate activity charged in the crimes now before us. For reasons I will explain, by the third path we' ought to refuse to apply the Hobbs Act to this genre of local robberies until Congress clearly states its purpose to do so. Only then should the courts decide the commerce question now being pressed upon us.
II
The Supreme Court has long required that if Congress intends to alter “the usual constitutional balance between the States *411and the Federal Government,”1 it must make an unmistakably clear statement of its intention to do so in the language of the statute.2
Although it found expression most often in the context of congressional abrogation of state sovereign immunity,3 the doctrine of clear statement has been applied broadly where uncertainty in the application of congressional directives would leave to the court the decision to upset the federal-state balance. The Supreme Court has invoked the doctrine in various settings. It found that states were not “persons” within the meaning of 42 U.S.C. § 1983,4 and that the Federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act could not be construed to interfere with a State’s choice of judges absent clear language that judges are included.5 Similarly, the doctrine of clear statement is one of the articulated limits on the spending power,6 and federal laws criminally punishing “conduct readily denounced as criminal by the States” are narrowly interpreted absent a clear statement of Congress’ intent to significantly alter the federal state-balance.7
The doctrine of clear statement is animated by principles of federalism inherent in the> structure of the. Constitution.8 Although the protection of the States against intrusive exercises of Congress’ Commerce Clause powers is still largely left to the political process,9 to permit courts to decide whether a poorly aimed congressional thrust encroached upon state regulation of intrastate criminal activity “would evade the very procedure for lawmaking on which Garcia relies to protect states’ interests.” 10 Insisting upon a clear statement from, the Congress is a modest exercise of judicial power. It only asks that Congress do its job, insisting that Congress engage its political responsibility by being clear of its purpose when it would reach into a sphere of state authority.11 In its most sanguine form, it “may lead some members to engage in the kind of deliberation about the scope of their Article I powers that they should undertake anyway as part *412of their responsibility to uphold the Constitution.” 12
The doctrine of clear statement does not require us to define “traditional governmental activities” in the abstract, an approach rejected by the Court in Garcia.13 We follow long-standing Supreme Court precedent, decided after Garcia,14 that requires us to be certain of Congressional purpose before finding that a federal law overrides the federal-state balance.15 There is here no cordoning off of traditional governmental activities — rather, we follow the Supreme Court’s lead, recognizing that the doctrine of clear statement protects a sphere of state authority.16 Local robberies of local businesses have always been the concern of state government and within this sphere of state authority that must not be entered absent a clear congressional statement.17 Significantly and independently it is a legal doctrine uniquely fitted to the hand of a court that would act with restraint in insisting that the enumerated powers remain just that. For this reason, by this path we would not now decide that the Hobbs Act may be applied to discrete local robberies. The political process ought to first decide its intended reach, at least before the full force of judicial review is unleashed.
Ill
The Hobbs Act fails to provide the expression of “unequivocal congressional intent” necessary to intrude upon this sphere of state authority.18 It is true that the statute reaches all robberies that affect commerce “in any way or degree,” 19 and it is also a truism that the Hobbs Act expresses congressional intent to use “all the constitutional power Congress has.”20 Neither of these statements state a congressional purpose to regulate the robberies here, as I will explain. And although in recent years there have been episodic federal prosecutions of these type of local robberies, this activity of other branches of government reflects purpose only in the sense that it was not halted by the Congress — inaction from which we ordinarily do not infer purpose and certainly not clear purpose. Significantly, there is no principled limit to a reading of commerce power that would sustain federal jurisdiction over the activity charged in the cases *413before us today. Those who would argue that the Congress has clearly expressed its purpose to make federal crimes of the robberies here will have to persuade that Congress intended to reach the proverbial “robbery of the lemonade stand”; that its purpose was to claim federal hegemony over local activities, including a street mugging. Either that or defy the words claimed to be so clear by some case-by^ case judgment that is little more than the arbitrary, “well, not that far.”
By the time the Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934 was amended and became the Hobbs Act, the Supreme Court had already held that congressional power under the Commerce Clause was “plenary and extends to all such commerce be it great or small.”21 This was a direct subscription to the view that the limits of congressional power under the Commerce Clause will be set by the political process; at the least the political process was the main player. As the Court later conceded in Katzenbach v. McClung,22, it would not “interfere” as long as Congress violated “no express constitutional limitation.”23 Until Lopez was decided, the Court upheld all Commerce Clause legislation as a matter of course, concluding that where there is “a rational basis for finding a chosen regulatory scheme necessary to the protection of commerce, our investigation is at an end.”24 Given that the Court wholly deferred to Congress’ own interpretation of the limits of the commerce power, the observation that the Hobbs Act purports to reach to the limits of the commerce power as defined by the courts sheds no light. In an era when the limits of the commerce power were defined by the Congress, even a congressional directive to reach to the limits of the Commerce Clause was no direction at all — it was wholly tautological and as we will see, the Hobbs Act definition of commerce was not even that pointed.
Lopez and Morrison, with the doctrine of substantiality, returned the courts to the field, to once again police the limits of congressional authority under the Commerce Clause. Arguably, when the Court began to withdraw from the concession to the political process, the earlier congressional directives that the Act ought reach as far as the constitution permits could then be seen as a clear expression of congressional purpose in that it was no longer talking to itself; rather the courts were to decide. But with the doctrine of substan-tiality, whether the meandering intrusions by local United States Attorneys can be validated if Congress wishes to do so, is at best uncertain. The statute’s description of robberies and its definition of commerce are quite different, its commerce definition clearly reaching conduct falling under the first two prongs of Lopez but leaving intrastate • activity (as before, us here) to be picked up at all only by its question-begging catch of all other commerce over which the United States has federal jurisdiction:
“commerce within the District of Columbia, or any Territory or Possession of the United States; all commerce be*414tween any point in a State, Territory, Possession, or the District of Columbia and any point outside thereof; all commerce between points within the same State through any place outside such State; and all other commerce over which the United States has jurisdiction.”25 (emphasis supplied)
The “robberies” in this case, if picked up at all, must be reached by the phrase “and all other commerce over which the United States has jurisdiction.” This expression of purpose, made at the zenith of legislative hegemony in the contest of who decides the limits of the commerce power, is no more plain than the Jones Act’s reach of any seaman or the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act’s reach of every firearm.26
IV
As we observed, it is now clear that this generalized reach cannot touch intrastate acts that do not have a substantial effect upon interstate commerce. The government concedes that the robberies before us cannot meet the substantial effects requirement — all robberies must be aggregated. At this point we can engage in a supposition that Congress thought all these local robberies were sufficiently linked to regulate them as a class. This is fanciful because such an aggregation was not even thought to be necessary at the time of the 1934 Act or the Hobbs Act. The fact is that Congress has never made that decision. It has never decided whether or what to aggregate.
Hickman insists that Morrison’s requirement that regulated intrastate activities have a substantial effect upon intrastate commerce has no content absent a further insistence upon a rational relationship among discrete effects that would be aggregated. This means that a judgment about the rationality of aggregating the effects of these discrete robberies is a correlative requirement of substantiality, and must be made. By this third path, it must first be made by the Congress. Only after that judgment is made, should the courts decide the issue of the level of deference due that legislative judgment. And it is then that the very content of the newly required substantial effect will be decided.
There is irony in a court about the task of policing the enumerated powers moving to the alternative of presuming a legislative judgment or supplying its own view in the first instance. If it is sufficient to hypothesize rationality, drawing upon the creativity of counsel and judicial imagination there is nothing substantial about substantiality; the courts will have wholly deferred to the political process as the arbiter of the state-federal role. On the other hand, if the congressional purpose is not relevant, or is simply supplied by the courts, the courts would be the exclusive arbiter. I am not persuaded that the principle of the separation of powers ought to only oscillate between these two polarities.
V
This is not the first time that the doctrine of clear statement has been applied to limit the application of a federal criminal statute to intrastate criminal conduct. *415In United States v. Bass,27 for example, the Court required a clear statement from Congress before it would apply the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act to extend federal law enforcement to a class of intrastate criminal activity that had long been regulated solely by the States.28 Two years later, in United States v. Enmons29 Congress applied this doctrine to the Hobbs Act. In Enmons the Court refused to apply the Hobbs Act to violence associated with a labor dispute even though this activity was presumptively within the broad bounds of the statute. Despite the general and broad language of the Hobbs Act, the Court required “language much more explicit” before it would apply it to local strikes because doing so would represent “an extraordinary change in federal labor law” and constitute “an unprecedented incursion into the criminal jurisdiction of the States.”30
In response to Enmons, the Sixth and Ninth Circuits narrowly construed the Hobbs Act, concluding that only activities that constitute “racketeering” are prohibited by the Act.31 The Court rejected this approach in United States v. Culbert32 concluding that it conflicted with a plain reading of the statute as well as the legislative history.33 Culbert also rejected the claim that the doctrine of clear statement required the Court to read a racketeering requirement into the Hobbs Act, characterizing the argument as an attempt to “manufacture ambiguity where none exists.” 34 The Court also rejected the idea that a racketeering requirement must be read into the Act because without a racketeering requirement, the federal-state balance would be upset. The Court held that “there is no question that Congress intended to define as a federal crime conduct that it knew was punishable under state law.”35 Of course, these were robberies fully under the first two prongs of Lopez, never seen as the exclusive domain of the states.
Culbert and Enmons teach that by defining as a federal crime conduct that it knew was punishable under state law, Congress knew that it would alter the balance of federal-state power. The question was whether the application of the statute would generate a result that interfered with state authority in a way that Congress had not intended.36 Unlike Culbert, which involved an attempted robbery of $100,000 from a federally insured bank, Enmons involved the application of the Hobbs Act to violence used to achieve legitimate union objectives in a strike, thereby effectuating “an unprecedented incursion into the criminal jurisdiction of the *416States.”37 Here', as in Enmons, we cannot apply the statute to violate the protected sphere of state authority without a clear statement that Congress intended that result.
VI
To make clear its purpose to regulate this activity, Congress must make a legislative judgment about the rationality of regulating the activity as a class, impliedly or explicitly. Courts in turn must decide the deference due that legislative judgment, a task that has proved difficult and divisive in the course of recent cases. Only then will it be decided whether the requirement of substantial effect has content or is only a symbolic waive of the judicial hand. The recent pattern of Commerce Clause cases offers a powerful argument for the dialogic legislative first step afforded by the doctrine of clear statement.
The Court’s claim of a judicial role in defining the limits of the commerce power did not suggest that it was to the exclusion of Congress. Nonetheless, we could simply proceed. And in justification point out that even with a clear statement, at the margins we might yet be engaged to adjudicate the limits by a case-by-case decision of this one’s in and that one’s out. But there remains the nagging precedent and transcendent question of the rationality of aggregating and what is meant by rationality, a task the Congress and the courts in turn have not faced. The question nags because of the further suggestion that unless no deference will be given to such a congressional decision, we ought not proceed without it, and the Supreme Court has not said that no deference is due.
All said, by the third path we ought to require Congress to first make clear the wholly intrastate robberies with an effect upon interstate commerce that it would regulate, whether connected by conspiracy, spree, or in some other way, possibly a confrontational response of single robbery without substantial effect. As Chief Justice Rehnquist reminded in Morrison:
[I]n the performance of assigned constitutional duties each branch of the government must initially interpret the Constitution, and the interpretation of its powers by any branch is due great respect from the others.... 38
We have nothing from the Congress.

. Will v. Michigan Dept. of State Police, 491 U.S. 58, 65, 109 S.Ct. 2304, 105 L.Ed.2d 45 (1989) (quoting Atascadero State Hosp. v. Scanlon, 473 U.S. 234, 242, 105 S.Ct. 3142, 87 L.Ed.2d 171 (1985)).

. Will, 491 U.S. at 65, 109 S.Ct. 2304; United States v. Bass, 404 U.S. 336, 349, 92 S.Ct. 515, 30 L.Ed.2d 488 (1971).

. Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 242, 105 S.Ct. 3142.

. Will, 491 U.S. at 65, 109 S.Ct. 2304.

. Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452, 463-64, 111 S.Ct. 2395, 115 L.Ed.2d 410 (1991). This although the statute provided that uncertainty of scope should be resolved in favor of coverage. Id. at 467, 111 S.Ct. 2395.

. South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 207, 107 S.Ct. 2793, 97 L.Ed.2d 171 (1987).

. Bass, 404 U.S. at 349, 92 S.Ct. 515.

. See Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44, 55-56, 116 S.Ct. 1114, 134 L.Ed.2d 252 (1996)-("This rule arises from a recognition of the important role played by the Eleventh Amendment and the broader principles that it reflects.”); Gregory, 501 U.S. at 461, 111 S.Ct. 2395 ("This plain statement rule is nothing more than an acknowledgment that the States retain substantial sovereign powers under our constitutional scheme.”).

. Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528, 105 S.Ct. 1005, 83 L.Ed.2d 1016 (1985) (declining to review limitations placed upon Congress' Commerce Clause powers by our federal system).

. Gregory, 501 U.S. at 465, 111 S.Ct. 2395 (quoting Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law § 6-25, at 480 (2d ed.1988)).

. See United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 577, 115 S.Ct. 1624, 131 L.Ed.2d 626 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (citing New York v. United *412States, 505 U.S. 144, 155-169, 112 S.Ct. 2408, 120 L.Ed.2d 120 (1992)).

. Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law § 5-9, at 857 (3d ed.2000).

. Garcia, 469 U.S. at 538-540, 105 S.Ct. 1005 (arguing that it is too difficult to define a “traditional governmental activity”).

. Gregory, 501 U.S. at 464, 111 S.Ct. 2395 (explaining how the doctrine of clear statement works in conjunction with Garcia’s conviction that the federal-state balance is primarily protected by the political process); Will, 491 U.S. at 65, 109 S.Ct. 2304; Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 247, 105 S.Ct. 3142 (articulating doctrine of clear statement four months after Garcia was decided).

. Id. at 460, 111 S.Ct. 2395 (citing Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 243, 105 S.Ct. 3142).

. Gregory, 501 U.S. at 460-61, 111 S.Ct. 2395 (requiring a clear statement of congressional intent before interpreting a law to infringe upon State sovereignty); see also Lopez, 514 U.S. at 611, 115 S.Ct. 1624 (Souter, J., dissenting) (noting that the doctrine of clear statement should be relied upon in cases implicating congressional encroachment upon "state legislative prerogatives” or "enterjmg] into spheres already occupied by the States.”).

. Bass, 404 U.S. at 349-50, 92 S.Ct. at 523-24.

. Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 247, 105 S.Ct. 3142.

. 18 U.S.C. § 1951.

. Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212, 215, 80 S.Ct. 270, 4 L.Ed.2d 252 (1960).

. Nat’l Labor Relations Bd. v. Fainblatt, 306 U.S. 601, 606, 59 S.Ct. 668, 83 L.Ed. 1014 (1939); see also Nick v. United States, 122 F.2d 660, 668-69 (8th Cir.1941) (holding that Fainblatt mandates an expansive reading of the Anti-Racketeering Act).

. 379 U.S. 294, 85 S.Ct. 377, 13 L.Ed.2d 290 (1964).

. Id. at 304, 85 S.Ct. 377.

. Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U.S. 183, 189, 88 S.Ct. 2017, 20 L.Ed.2d 1020 (1968) (quoting Katzenbach, 379 U.S. at 303-04, 85 S.Ct. 377).

. 18 U.S.C. § 1951(b)(3) (emphasis added).

. Welch, 483 U.S. at 475-76, 107 S.Ct. 2941 (applying doctrine of clear statement to exempt states from the Jones Act despite the sweeping language of "[a]ny seaman” in the statute); Bass, 404 U.S. at 350, 92 S.Ct. 515 (employing the doctrine of clear statement to exclude the "mere possession” of firearms from the reach of the Act).

. Bass, 404 U.S. at 349-51, 92 S.Ct. 515.

. Id. at 350-51, 92 S.Ct. 515.

. 410 U.S. 396, 93 S.Ct. 1007, 35 L.Ed.2d 379 (1973).

. Id. at 350-51, 92 S.Ct. 515.

. United States v. Culbert, 548 F.2d 1355 (9th Cir.1977); United States v. Yokley, 542 F.2d 300 (6th Cir.1976).

. 435 U.S. 371, 98 S.Ct. 1112, 55 L.Ed.2d 349 (1978).

. Id. at 373-378, 98 S.Ct. 1112.

. Id. at 379, 98 S.Ct. 1112.

. Id. at 379, 98 S.Ct. 1112.

. It should be noted that while Culbert held that "Congress intended to make criminal all conduct within the reach of the statutory language" of the Hobbs Act, this must be read as a response to the argument that a racketeering requirement be read into an act, given that the conduct reached in Enmons fit within the statutory language but presumably could not be reached without a clear statement from Congress.

. Enmons, 410 U.S. at 411, 93 S.Ct. 1007.

. United States v. Morrison, n. 7 529 U.S. 598, 120 S.Ct. 1740, 1753, 146 L.Ed.2d 658 (2000).