Commerce Clause
With regard to the Commerce Clause, the majority said that
United States v. Lopez (1995) was the controlling precedent.
Lopez held that the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 was uncons utional. There as in
Morrison, the court stressed "enumerated powers" that limit federal power in order to maintain "a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local."
Lopez therefore limited the scope of the Commerce Clause to exclude activity that was not directly economic in nature, even if there were indirect economic consequences.
Lopez was the first significant limitation on the Commerce Clause powers of Congress in 53 years.
The majority concluded that acts of violence such as those that VAWA was meant to remedy had only an "attenuated" effect, not a substantial one, on interstate commerce. The government, however, argued that "a mountain of evidence" indicated that these acts in the aggregate did have a substantial effect; for this proposition it relied on
Wickard v. Filburn (1942), which held that Congress could regulate an individual act that lacked a substantial effect on interstate commerce if, when aggregated, acts of that sort had the required relation to interstate commerce. Once again relying on
Lopez, the majority replied that the aggregation principle of
Wickard did not apply because economic effects of crimes against women were indirect, and therefore could not be addressed through the Commerce Clause.
The Court explained that the need to distinguish between economic activities that directly and those that indirectly affect interstate commerce was due to "the concern that we expressed in
Lopez that Congress might use the Commerce Clause to completely obliterate the Cons ution’s distinction between national and local authority." Referring to
Lopez, the Court said: "Were the Federal Government to take over the regulation of entire areas of traditional State concern, areas having nothing to do with the regulation of commercial activities, the boundaries between the spheres of federal and State authority would blur." The majority further stated, "[I]t is difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power, even in areas such as criminal law enforcement or education where States historically have been sovereign." Justice Thomas's concurring opinion also expressed the concern that "Congress [was] appropriating State police powers under the guise of regulating commerce."
The majority, quoting from
NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937), said that the scope of the interstate commerce power
“must be considered in the light of our dual system of government and may not be extended so as to embrace effects upon interstate commerce so indirect and remote that to embrace them, in view of our complex society, would effectually obliterate the distinction between what is national and what is local and create a completely centralized government.”
The
Lopez court stated that Congress may regulate (1) use of the channels of interstate commerce, (2) the "instrumentalities" (for example, vehicles) used in interstate commerce, and (3) activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Because VAWA's civil remedy concededly did not regulate the first or second categories, the
Morrison court analyzed its validity under the third.