Commerce Clause the United States

Commerce Clause

The United States Constitution has provided the people of America with many useful ways to govern themselves. The Commerce Clause which is found in the Constitution is one of these methods that has helped shape and define the methods America has conducted its business throughout the last 230 years. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the Commerce Clause and its impact on American development. The essay will also discuss the New Deal introduced in the early 20th century and how the Commerce Clause affected federalism and the way state governments interact with the federal government.

For most of its existence, the Commerce Clause has played an important but not dominant role in America's history and its contributions towards its economy. Every so often in history the clause was referred to in some relevant and important court cases. There are many differing interpretations of this clause which have caused these problems and brought about legal disputes.

The Commerce Clause is a grant of power to Congress, not an express limitation on the power of the states to regulate the economy. Many conflicting interpretations of the Commerce Clause have been proposed and discussed by legal scholars. It has been suggested that the clause gives Congress the exclusive power to regulate commerce. Under this centralized and hegemonic interpretation, states are stripped of all power to regulate interstate commerce. Another interpretation suggested that the clause gives Congress and the states shared power to regulate commerce. Under this view, state regulation of commerce is invalid only when it is preempted by federal law. A third, suggests that the clause assumes that Congress and the states each have their own mutually exclusive zones of regulatory power. Under this interpretation, it becomes the job of the courts to determine whether one sovereign has invaded the exclusive regulatory zone of the other. Finally, it has been suggested that the clause by its own force divests states of the power to regulate commerce in certain ways, but the states and Congress retain concurrent power to regulate commerce in many other ways. This fourth interpretation, a complicated hybrid of two others, turns out to be the approach taken by many courts in its decisions interpreting the Commerce Clause (Denato, 2012).

Problems have arisen under all of these pretexts but the biggest problem arose in the middle of the 20th century during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Dowes (2005) suggested that this was the greatest use of its power until recent times. He reported that "then came Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, an acknowledgment that the federal government's failure to play an active role in regulating the national economy had led to the Great Depression. The New Deal jolted the commerce clause into high gear, creating the regulatory agencies, commissions, and boards that continue to oversee the United States' commercial life."

During that administration, Roosevelt attempted to assert a lot of federal power that had not been previously asserted by the federal government. However, a number of such laws pressed through Congress were found by the U.S. Supreme Court to lack constitutional authority. For many of these pet endeavors, FDR claimed commerce clause authority.

Much of the disagreement with the law stems from the word " commerce." This is a very broad term and is the root word of commercialism. The Constitution does not explicitly define the word. Some would present the idea that it refers simply to trade or exchange, while others claim that the founders of this country and the writers of the document, intended to describe more broadly commercial and social intercourse between citizens of different states. Thus, the interpretation of "commerce" affects the appropriate dividing line between federal and state power.