The View From 1776

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Barton Bennett emailed the following two article links.

In the first, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., blames Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Barton’s apt comment:  “I wonder who caused Hurricane Camille in 1969 when some “scientists” thought we were entering another ice age?”

The second article from Barton, titled “Storms Vary With Cycles, Experts Say,” flatly contradicts Mr. Kennedy’s thesis.  Astonishingly, it comes from that icon of liberal-socialism, the New York Times.

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CAROL TUROFF
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David Burnell Smith: A Lesson in Voting for Slogans
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August 29, 2005

Clean Elections, the voter approved election reform measure, became Arizona law in 1998. The catchy title was enough to put the wind in its sails. Who is inclined to vote in opposition to something ?clean??? The inference implicit in the name is that any other system would be dirty. Cast that ballot for sweetness and light!
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Omitted from disclosure is the fact that public funding of campaigns, which put nearly $13 million of taxpayer?s money into 2002 candidate?s coffers, requires donations to those with whom contributors may disagree.?Opponents consider this an infringement of First Amendment protections.
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Fast forward to the present.?State 7 Rep. David Burnell Smith (R-D7), a freshman legislator from Carefree, is teetering on the precipice of being ousted by the Arizona Citizen?s Clean Elections Commission, with the sanction of an administrative law judge. The spectacle of a duly elected representative of the people under threat of removal from office, by an unelected panel at the recommendation of an appointed judge, cuts to the heart of the elective process. Thanks to the not-so-Clean Elections, Rep. Smith is in the precarious position of becoming the only elected legislator in the United States, not convicted of a crime, facing removal from office?without being?impeached or recalled.
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Smith, a Republican, is accused of overspending his public funding by approximately $6000 during the 2002 primary election, a violation of campaign finance regulations. Although he disputes the claim and vows to fight the charges in court, the commission has determined that Rep. Smith should be removed from office, pay a fine of $10,000 and refund $34,625 in public funds.
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A lawyer since 1972, Smith is no novice to the intricacies of the law. Licensed to practice in Colorado, Maryland and Arizona, he has instructed in constitutional, civil and criminal law. From 1985 through 1998, Smith served as Presiding Judge for the Peoria and Cave Creek Municipal Courts and as Pro Tem Judge in Wickenburg. He has instructed new judges for the Arizona judiciary.
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However, complying with the ?Clean? Elections? financial filing process is a complex morass, less well navigated, it appears, by Republicans than by Democrats. With few exceptions those with the targets on their backs lean to the right. In the 2000 election cycle, Dist. 18 legislative candidate, Democrat Victoria Wold, was accused by the commission of misusing $25,000 in public funding.? Ultimately, she faced no censure by the commission and paid no fines.
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?I went to Clean Elections because I thought the campaign had overspent in the primary election,? explained Smith. ?Instead of providing help, the commission stabbed me in the back and is trying to remove me from office. Since I approached the commission, my new accountant, Jeff Hill, found numerous errors in the campaign, including an overpayment of about $3000 to my campaign vendor, Constantin Querard, which Mr. Querard has reimbursed,? said Smith. ?That money was then reimbursed to Citizen?s Clean Elections. They accepted the money, but never gave me credit for repayment.?
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Accountant Jeff Hill, a former six-term state senator, was majority whip and chaired the senate finance committee during his tenure in the legislature. His credentials along with those of Rep. Smith are impressive.?Whether these professionals are able to withstand the assault of a reckless commission intent upon unseating an elected legislator and subverting constitutional authority remains to be seen.?
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Rep. Smith has promised the voters of his district that he will continue to represent them next year and will seek reelection in 2006. Meanwhile, the citizens of Arizona have a problem of major proportions on their hands. While public funding proponents point with pride to the increased number of candidates whom they say would not enter the fray without taxpayers picking up the tab, the marketplace is still the best equalizer. Those who bring constructive and innovative ideas to the political arena have always found others willing to support their candidacies.?Compelling voters to finance those whose views they oppose is an impediment to truly ?clean? elections.
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Voters have an obligation to inform themselves and look deeper than slick slogans attached to ballot initiatives. For those fond of such glibness however, this is worth committing to memory: Taxpayer funded they are—Clean they are not.

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Carol Turoff is a former two-term member of the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments. During her eight years on the commission, she participated in the selection of?four of the five current Arizona Supreme Court Justices as well as 17 judges on both Division I and II of the Arizona Court of Appeals. Appointed by two governors, Turoff served with three chairing Supreme Court Justices.

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Pajama Hadin documents both faces of the mainstream [socialist] media.

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29/08: Advice on Saddam by the MSM in 1997

Posted by: pajamahadin

How the Press felt about Saddam back in 1997 when Clinton was in office:

? “Conventional Wisdom,” Newsweek, Nov. 17: “Take him down.” (next to a photo of Hussein and a downward-plunging arrow)

? Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist, New York Times, Nov. 6: “Saddam Hussein is the reason God created cruise missiles. ...So if and when Saddam pushes beyond the brink, and we get that one good shot, let’s make sure it’s a head shot.”

? George Stephanopolous, former Clintonite and current ABC News analyst, on ABC’S “This Week,” Nov. 9: “This is probably one of those rare cases where assassination is the more moral course…we should kill him.”

? Sam Donaldson, co-host of “This Week,” Nov. 9: We should kill Saddam “under cover of law…. We can do business with his successor.”

? Bill Kristol, ABC News analyst, “This Week,” Nov. 9: “It sounds good to me.”

? Cokie Roberts, co-host of “This Week,” Nov. 9: “Well, now that we’ve come out for murder on this broadcast, let us move on to fast-track…”

? Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, Nov. 17: “It won’t be easy to take him out. ...But we need to try, because the only language Saddam has ever understood is force.”

? Newsweek, Dec. 1: “Why We Should Kill Saddam.”

These citations were compiled by Eric Umansky at http://www.motherjones.com on November 25, 1997.

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Believe It or Not: Abortion Causes Illegal Immigration

By Nathan Tabor

Today, I?m going to tell you a tale that could have come straight out of the annals of Ripley?s ?Believe It or Not.?

Not very many people have made the connection, but I believe that Legal Abortion in America is at least partially to blame for the human flood of Illegal Immigration streaming daily across our borders. Some will immediately dismiss this suggested linkage as being too far-fetched and preposterous ? but before rejecting the idea, let?s take a look at some interesting numbers.

In 1973, the year that the notorious Roe v Wade decision became the law of the land, American women legally murdered 615,831 innocent unborn children. The grisly toll rose year by year, until by 1982 the number of annual abortions had doubled, reaching almost 1,304,000. Of course, these are the documented deaths, they fail to include the additional thousands of babies murdered outside the medical realm.

According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, the first eleven years of legal abortions in America killed about 11.9 million babies (from 1973 to 1983). If those aborted children had lived and grown to adulthood, their median age today would be 30.5 years old.

Now, the number of estimated illegal immigrants in the U.S.A. ranges from 10.3 million to 15 million; so add these two numbers together and divide by two, and you get about 12.5 million as a pretty close guesstimate of how many illegal workers, mostly Mexican, are now in America.

Is this mere coincidence, or is there some direct correlation between those two numbers, 11.9 million and 12.5 million? I think it is both. Without question, at least part of the reason why we have illegal immigrants crossing our borders in droves is because there is a need for more cheap laborers in the fields and factories of America. It is a simple economic proposition: increased demand creates its own supply.

In fact, these same feminist-inspired demographic trends have resulted in 34 million women joining the workforce between 1970 and 2000, during a time when American birth rates dropped from 18.4 to 13.9 per thousand. The new addition of these women to the workforce has helped to mask the growing demand for labor during a time of explosive economic expansion, ?from 5.03 trillion in 1970 to 11.75 trillion in 2004 as measured in 2005 dollars,? as WorldNetDaily columnist Vox Day brilliantly pointed out in his August 15 column entitled ?Girls just want to have fun.?

Day also warned that the American birth rate has fallen ?by 25 percent to sub-replacement levels,? and this sterile trend threatens all of Western Civilization from North America to Europe. So maybe I?m not the only voice crying in the wilderness about the economic problems that legalized abortions have caused in our society.

True, the U.S. desperately needs welfare reform. There are far too many idle Americans who could do at least some of the menial, hard and dirty jobs that now go to illegal immigrants by default. Certainly, we need to cultivate a better work ethic and an entrepreneurial spirit among our own people.

Nevertheless, I still believe that at least 50 percent of the problem we face is the fact that we have killed off almost 12 million potential workers in the U.S.A. who would now be between the ages of 26 and 35. Nature abhors a vacuum, economic or otherwise.

As the years pass we will see if my hypothesis is correct. If I am wrong, then illegal immigration eventually will level off. However, that massive influx of humanity shows no sign of slacking. As the number of abortions continues to increase each year, so does the growing tide of illegal aliens crossing our borders and filling our cities.

Here?s a recent first that does not bode well for our future. Just last week, the white American population of the state of Texas was officially declared to be a minority. Unless we somehow manage to seal our borders, California and New Mexico may not be far behind.

Here are some more disturbing figures. Between 1983 and 1993, we aborted 13.5 million babies in the U.S. Their median age today would be 20.5. These are nonexistent, wasted human beings who would be either in college right now, or just graduating high school and starting a job and maybe a family of their own.

Who will replace them? Most likely, 15 million more foreign-born Hispanics with a propensity for hard work and a burning desire to reclaim the American Southwest for Mexico.

As the famous carnival showman Ripley would say: ?Believe It or Not.?

Copyright ? 2005 by Nathan Tabor

Nathan Tabor is a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina. He has his BA in psychology and his MA in public policy. He is a contributing editor at The Conservative Voice. Contact him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) .

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In G8 Socialist gospel I wrote: Socialists, which includes all of Western Europe and nearly half of the United States, sincerely believe that redistributing private property will magically transform human nature, end poverty, and bring peace, tranquility, and prosperity to Africa.? In the real world this is dangerous and wasteful sentimentality.

The August 31, 2005, issue of the Wall Street Journal carries an op-ed article by C.K. Prahalad, Distinguished University Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, which adds some interesting perspective to the issue.

It can be accessed here if you are a Journal online edition subscriber.

The following is an excerpt:

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AID IS NOT THE ANSWER
By C.K. PRAHALAD ?August?31,?2005

There is an inherent paradox in the debate about poverty alleviation that escapes even the most sophisticated observers in the West. Consider the conventional thinking about China and India: They are seen as a threat to the West. The fear is not only about “exporting well paying U.S. jobs” but also about competition for resources such as oil and commodities. Yet India is home to more than 500 million people who live on less than $3 a day. In China, the number may be around 400 million. Just these two countries represent 900 million people in poverty, a larger number than the entire population of Africa. There are about 600 million in Africa who live on less than $3 per day. Why, then, do China and India evoke fear and anger, while Africa elicits pity and guilt?

Despite the magnitude of their respective poverty problems, China and India may have a chance of meeting the Millennium Development Goals established by U.N. Their economies are following the lead of other countries that have raised their populations into a middle-class economic base. For example, between 1975 and 2004, GDP per capita in South Korea increased fourfold. Over the same period, Malaysian incomes rose threefold.

On the other hand, in those decades, per capita incomes in Nigeria declined by a tenth. Why? During the period 1955-2004, the West and multilateral institutions invested more than $1 trillion in aid and subsidies in emerging economies. But poverty persists. It would seem, therefore, that we need to challenge the role of aid and subsidies in promoting sustainable economic development. If poverty cannot be eradicated with humanitarian handouts alone, what is the alternative?

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The G-8, led by Tony Blair and supported by Jeffery Sachs and Bono, believe that debt relief and a doubling of aid from rich countries to poor, especially in Africa, is the way to go. A less popular alternative focuses on the involvement of the private sector in poverty alleviation through the development of market-based ecosystems.

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The second, or middle, period of judicial activism was, on balance, a conservative one.  The Supreme Court more often than not restrained states and the Federal government when they sought to regulate corporations and to expand the scope of government activities.

This stands in stark contrast to the Supreme Court of the 20th century, when the educated public began looking upon socialism as the way of the future, and Justices responded, first with greater leniency toward government regulation, then, after 1937, with an aggressive thrust to push government toward welfare-state social justice. 

The first era ended when Chief Justice John Marshall died in 1835.  As noted in Judicial Activism: Part VI, without his 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, judicial activism would not have become possible.  By establishing the power of the Supreme Court to declare actions of Congress or of the President unconstitutional, Marshall opened the door for all of today’s mischief.

His death occurred the same year that Alexis de Tocqueville published “Democracy in America.”  In Chapter 6: Judicial Power In The United States, And Its Influence On Political Society,  Tocqueville noted, ironically in light of today’s woeful situation:

“The Americans have retained these three distinguishing characteristics of the judicial power: an American judge can pronounce a decision only when litigation has arisen, he is conversant only with special cases, and he cannot act until the cause has been duly brought before the court.  His position is therefore exactly the same as that of the magistrates of other nations, and yet he is invested with immense political power.  How does this come about?  If the sphere of his authority and his means of action are the same as those of other judges, whence does he derive a power which they do not possess?  The cause of this difference lies in the simple fact that the Americans have acknowledged the right of judges to found their decisions on the Constitution rather than on the laws.  In other words, they have permitted them not to apply such laws as may appear to them to be unconstitutional.

“.... If the judge had been empowered to contest the law on the ground of theoretical generalities, if he were able to take the initiative and to censure the legislator, he would play a prominent political part; and as the champion or the antagonist of a party, he would have brought the hostile passions of the nation into the conflict.”

Today the situation is the opposite of that described in the last sentence above.

In Chapter 16: Causes Which Mitigate The Tyranny Of The Majority In The United States, Tocqueville says of lawyers:

“I do not, then, assert that all the members of the legal profession are at all times the friends of order and the opponents of innovation, but merely that most of them are usually so.  In a community in which lawyers are allowed to occupy without opposition that high station which naturally belongs to them, their general spirit will be eminently conservative and anti-democratic.

“......Lawyers are attached to public order beyond every other consideration, and the best security of public order is authority…...... The English and the Americans have retained the law of precedents; that is to say, they continue to found their legal opinions and the decisions of their courts upon the opinions and decisions of their predecessors.  In the mind of an English or American lawyer a taste and a reverence for what is old is almost always united with a love of regular and lawful proceedings.”

It hardly need be said that our elite Ivy League law schools have, for many decades, been dedicated to inculcating in future judges precisely the opposite view.

John Marshall was succeed as Chief Justice by Roger B. Taney, who presided over the Court until 1864, a year before the end of the Civil War.  Legal principles laid out between 1836 and 1864 under Taney established the framework for the more turbulent period following the Civil War.

Taney is forever connected in the public mind with his notorious Dred Scott decision, which effectively nullified the Missouri Compromise and hastened the Civil War.  Scott, a Negro slave, sued for his freedom on the grounds that during travels with his master he had lived in states where slavery was illegal.  Justice Taney ruled that, as a slave, Scott was the property of his owner, and that the 5th Amendment prohibits deprivation of property without due process of law.  Simply living in a free state did not constitute due process sufficient to free a slave without financial compensation to his owner.

As had Marshall in the Marbury v. Madison case, Justice Taney went far beyond the issues of the immediate case, and volunteered the opinion that Congress had no authority to enact the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in the new Western territories.

Nonetheless, civil rights was not a cause in which the Supreme Court took an aggressive, leading role, as it was to do in the 1950s and 1960s.  The Supreme Court’s major preoccupation was the evolving nature of business in the United States and the related evolution in the nature of corporations.

The stage for this second broad era in the Supreme Court’s activist orientation had been set during Marshall’s tenure by the immense changes in geopolitical reality that occurred during the so-called Virginia presidential dynasty of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. 

Despite having come to office in opposition to the activist government projects of his Federalist predecessors, such as the First Bank of the United States, Jefferson in 1803 consummated the Louisiana Purchase encompassing a vast territory that considerably more than doubled the land area of the United States.  Most importantly, it opened the Port of New Orleans to world trade by American settlers moving into the Northwest Territories (present-day Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and part of Minnesota).  The Mississippi River connection to New Orleans was vital, because a nearly unbroken chain of mountains ran between the original eastern seaboard states and the Northwest Territories, making overland east-west movement of farm produce and other products costly and impractical.

During the administration of President James K. Polk, from 1845 to 1849, the territory of the contiguous continental United States was completed with the acquisition of California and the southwestern states in the Mexican War and with the settlement of the Oregon Territory boundary with Canada. 

The movement of several hundred thousand Americans into the Mississippi Valley and the far West forced the states and the Federal government to consider expansion of their earlier activities.  In 1825, the Erie Canal, financed by the State of New York, connected New York City to the growing Midwest via the Great Lakes, rapidly turning New York City into the nation’s largest port.  By 1844 more than 3,000 miles of canals, built by state governments and private companies, interconnected parts of the Midwest with the East Coast.  By the 1850s railroads were already beginning to make many of the canals obsolete, and Chicago was on its way to becoming the world’s largest railroad hub and one of the greatest manufacturing cities.

Commercial projects on this scale obviously were a world apart from the sole proprietorship farms and businesses that were Jefferson’s ideal in 1800.  Unprecedented amounts of capital investment were required, most of it coming from England via bankers in New York City and Philadelphia.

The Taney era was the period during which many of the fundamental questions of the powers and rights of modern corporations were first addressed.  In the process, the meaning of the Constitution’s commerce clause was shaped.

Business corporations are creatures of the particular states in which they are chartered, which therefore retain the legal right to impose regulations upon them.  The nature of such regulations changed considerably while Taney was Chief Justice, simply because the nature of corporations changed greatly.

Historically, corporations were monopolies granted by royal prerogative for specific lines of endeavor, such as production and sale of salt.  One of the best known of the early corporate monopolies was the British East India Company, which held a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies, leading to the famous Boston Tea Party.

The early American colonies themselves were corporations chartered by the Stuart kings.  Those charters eventually became state constitutions.

The colonial corporations had officers, directors, and shareholders who financed voyages and early expenses of settlement.  The New England Puritans and Lord Calvert’s Maryland Catholics came here for religious purposes, but other colonies were viewed at the time as business ventures from which the shareholders expected to earn a profit.

Chief Justice Taney generally followed in the Marshall tradition of upholding private property rights against local interference.  But, unlike Marshall, Taney did not believe that the commerce clause was a dormant power intended only to impose restraints upon state regulatory actions.  The commerce clause, he believed, empowered Congress to regulate commerce among the states and empowered the Supreme Court to adjudicate conflicts between state and Federal regulations of commerce.  On the whole, however, Taney tended to limit expansionist ideas about regulatory powers to the minimum necessary for carrying out explicitly granted Constitutional functions.

His was a continuing effort to find a reasonable balance between state and Federal powers under the commerce clause, while dealing with new economic problems arising from technological innovation and greater size of business organizations.

Within limits, he upheld the states’ power to regulate property rights in the public interest.  Massachusetts was upheld, in the 1837 Charles River Bridge case, when it chartered a new bridge that competed with a bridge chartered earlier.  Harking back to the concept of corporate charters as royal monopoly grants, the Charles River Bridge Company argued that the State of Massachusetts had implicitly granted to it an exclusive right to build a bridge between Boston and Charlestown. 

Taney construed corporate and contract rights strictly and narrowly and ruled that Massachusetts had not implicitly granted a monopoly to the Charles River Bridge Company and therefore had not unconstitutionally deprived the company of its rights.  While rights of private property are sacred, he wrote, the general citizenry also have rights that must be weighed in the balance.  The effect upon commerce proved to be beneficial, as it opened business activity to the vitalizing force of competition.

One question coming before the Court was whether a corporation, a legal “person,” had the same rights as an individual to conduct business across state lines, without express authorization from each state in which it intended to operate.  One extreme legal view, which would have killed interstate commerce, was that no corporation could do any kind of business outside the state in which it was chartered.

This issue came into early focus in the instance of banks, which financed planting and processing of crops in one state, while financing buyers of the crops in other states, often as two ends of the same transaction. 

The Bank of Augusta case in 1839 came before the Court, only three years after Chief Justice Taney, then Secretary of the Treasury, had assisted President Andrew Jackson in killing the Second Bank of the United States on the grounds that it exercised too much unrestrained power in a democratic, Federal republic.  The frontier farmers represented by Andrew Jackson feared the big city bankers and corporations, but needed their services if they were to sell their crops and prosper. 

Taney straddled the fence by arguing that a corporation was not a citizen of a state and was therefore not entitled to the rights of individual citizens freely to move into other states.  As a creature of state law, it was entitled only to what each state law granted and had no independent Constitutional rights.  Nonetheless, a corporation could do business through its agents in other states wherever those other states permitted it to do so.  This had the effect of enhancing each state’s powers to regulate activity of corporations, both those it chartered and those chartered by other states.  At the same time it allowed for the necessary growth of corporations as the nation expanded.

In the 1843 case of Bronson v. Kinzie, the Court ruled unconstitutional a state’s interference with the execution of a mortgage.  But, in the 1847 License Cases, the Court ruled in favor of some varieties of state regulation.  Taney wrote in his opinion: “It appears to me to be very clear, that the mere grant of power to the general [Federal] government cannot, upon any just principles of construction, be construed as an absolute prohibition to the exercise of any power over the same subject by the states.”  This was the so-called concurrent powers doctrine.

In the same cases, in what appears today as sad naivet?, Justice Catron wrote: “... the states, within their harbors and inland waters, have done almost everything and Congress next to nothing.”  If the Court were to rule against state regulations, “We would by our decision expunge more state laws and city corporate regulations than Congress is likely to make in a century.” 

There is a close connection between states’ right to tax business and their right to regulate commerce within their borders.  Taxation, of course, can have a regulatory effect by making some activities less profitable than others.  Both taxation and regulation by states can collide with the Constitution’s commerce clause, which conferred exclusive jurisdiction to the Federal government over interstate and foreign commerce.

In the 1849 Passenger Cases, the Court limited the scope of the concurrent powers doctrine, ruling that New York and Massachusetts had strayed into territory reserved to Congress.  Both states, being flooded with immigrants from Ireland (because of the potato famine) and from Germany (because of the 1848 socialist revolutions), sought to curb the influx of impoverished immigrants who became charges upon the public welfare.  To that end, both states imposed per capita taxes on passenger ships discharging immigrants from foreign ports.  The taxes were levied upon the masters of each vessel, and they sought relief from the Supreme Court on the grounds that the states were unconstitutionally regulating foreign commerce. 

The majority of the court agreed and nullified the state taxes.  Justice Taney, however, dissented, writing: “The taxing power of the State is restrained only where the tax is directly or indirectly a duty on imports or tonnage….And if it is hereafter to be the law of this court, that the power to regulate commerce has abridged the taxing power of the States upon the vehicles or instruments of commerce, I cannot foresee to what it may lead….....”  Elsewhere, Taney had written: “In taking jurisdiction, as the law now stands, we must exercise a broad and undefinable discretion, without any certain and safe rule to guide….such a discretion appears to me more appropriately to belong to the Legislature than to the Judiciary.”

Needless to say, such judicial restraint is no longer in fashion among the liberal-socialists now occupying the bench.

Further defining the Constitution’s commerce clause, in the 1851 Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia case, Justice Curtis delivered the opinion of the Court, in which he wrote: : “Now the power to regulate commerce, embraces a vast field, containing not only many, but extraordinarily various subjects, quite unlike in their nature; some imperatively demanding a single uniform rule, operating equally on the commerce of the United States in every port, and some, like the subject now in question, as imperatively demanding that diversity, which alone can meet the local necessities of navigation…. Whatever subjects of this power are in their nature national, or admit only of one uniform system, or plan of regulation may justly be said to be of such a nature as to require exclusive legislation by Congress.”

Many other cases could be cited, but the intent here is not to analyze the detailed evolution of Constitutional law, but simply to present a sense of the Supreme Court’s understanding of the powers of the Federal government and of the powers reserved by the Constitution to the states and to the people by the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Bill of Rights.

The picture of caution and probity evidenced in the foregoing case descriptions is a sharp contrast with that of the Court since 1937, after it began acceding to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, socialistic state planners.  The New Deal, for the first time in our history, sought to take centralized control of the entire economy, which necessarily meant making the Constitution’s commerce clause all-embracing and exclusively a Federal prerogative.  Since 1937, the liberal-socialistic thesis has been that every species of human activity has a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce, thus nothing is beyond the reach of Federal regulation.

In that vein, today’s Court all too often is given to sweeping pronouncements that completely foreclose diversity among the states and bypass the lengthy debates in Congress and state legislatures that eventually would create public consensus on controversial issues such as Roe v. Wade.

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