This illustrates the huge problem with courts' interpretation of the Commerce Clause: it's used in some very useful ways to allow for some very useful regulatio

This illustrates the huge problem with courts' interpretation of the Commerce Clause: it's used in some very useful ways to allow for some very useful regulation and lawmaking... but it's also used in some messed up ways, like this one. (Arguably this one is a fairly minor bad way.) I'm not sure what the solution is. Throwing out the expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause could be disastrous in the general sense, even if it ends up striking some laws that are clearly an abuse of federal power over the states. But the real problem is the motivation: conservatives in the US seem to want to dismantle the federal government and turn over nearly every domestic concern to the states (except where they get to impose "conservative, Christian values" on the rest of the country, of course). I get why that can be an attractive proposition in some areas, but overall I think it would be disastrous. Many problems we face today (that we did not face in the late 1700s) more or less require a coordinated, national response, via legislation and regulation. And on top of that, we can expect decisions based on ideology, and the future looks bad to me. Nationwide environmental protections set by the EPA? Nope, unconstitutional, interstate commerce doesn't cover that sort of thing. And things like California setting strict emission standards that end up being the standard? Nope, can't do that either, that's interference in interstate commerce.