Once again, a court has refused to recognize any meaningful limit to Congress’s authority to regulate Americans’ private lives through the Commerce Clause. On Wednesday, after a long delay in considering the case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reversed a district court order that had declared the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)’s regulations prohibiting the “taking” of the Utah prairie dog (effectively, anything that may disrupt its habitat) unconstitutional. (This is a case in which Cato had filed a brief nearly two years ago.)
The court held that, since Congress had a rational basis to believe that protecting the prairie dog “constituted an essential part of a comprehensive regulatory scheme that, in the aggregate, substantially affects interstate commerce,” the FWS regulations are authorized under Article I, section 8. This, despite acknowledging that “taking” the prairie dogs—which exist solely within the borders of Utah and have no economic value—is a “noncommercial, purely intrastate activity.”
The case was brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Property Owners (PETPO), a nonprofit organization formed by Utah residents and property owners to protect their interests in the face of FWS’s burdensome regulations. Its members have been prevented from building homes, starting small businesses, and even from protecting local parks and cemetery grounds. Finally, enough was enough and PETPO brought suit against the FWS on the grounds that neither the Commerce Clause nor the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to regulate this rodent on nonfederal land. Such is the bizarre dreamscape in which the Tenth Circuit exists: where the power to regulate interstate commerce somehow covers activities that are neither interstate nor commercial.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/court-says-regulation-state-noncommercial-activity-valid-regulation-interstate-commerce-somehow
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