• In total there are 2 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 2 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Ch. 2 - Congress: Lots of Power to a Herd of Cats

#184: Sept. - Nov. 2022 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
Chris OConnor

1A - OWNER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 17016
Joined: Sun May 05, 2002 2:43 pm
21
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 3509 times
Been thanked: 1309 times
Gender:
Contact:
United States of America

Ch. 2 - Congress: Lots of Power to a Herd of Cats

Unread post

How to Read the Constitution - and Why
By Kim Wehle


Ch. 2 - Congress: Lots of Power to a Herd of Cats

Please use this thread to discuss the above chapter.
User avatar
Harry Marks
Bookasaurus
Posts: 1920
Joined: Sun May 01, 2011 10:42 am
12
Location: Denver, CO
Has thanked: 2335 times
Been thanked: 1020 times
Ukraine

Re: Ch. 2 - Congress: Lots of Power to a Herd of Cats

Unread post

This chapter was a bit amorphous. Some interesting topics, though.

Obamacare gets a lot of coverage. The Commerce Clause, under which the Congress may make Federal laws concerning "interstate commerce" has been stretched since the New Deal to cover almost everything that cannot be clearly distinguished from interstate commerce. My favorite exception was the birth of deregulation.

Most transport prices were regulated into the 70s, as a legacy of the collusion between Rockefeller and the railroads. But California allowed freely set prices on air traffic between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and I don't know if the relevant regulators (the CAB) allowed it as an experiment or just didn't challenge it. Since it was within a state, it may have been protected from regulation. But the interesting result was that fares dropped dramatically. Prices which had been set to protect consumers (and, to be fair, to avoid "ruinous competition") turned out to be costing consumers a lot of money. Within about five years (1978) prices were deregulated between states as well. People Express was born, and then a host of such cut price airlines. Two of them, Ryan Air and Easy Jet, do very well in Europe, now, carrying as many passengers as the national flag carriers. Interestingly, hub structures turned out to be much more difficult to challenge by a competitor, and have permitted airlines to raise prices a bit, though not to the level before deregulation.

Another big topic is the "necessary and proper" clause, with a lot of info and analysis that was new to me. It is also heavily implicated in Obamacare, and the SCOTUS probably thought it had killed Obamacare when it ruled that the individual mandate was unconstitutional under the necessary and proper clause (one of a string of really stupid decisions the conservative majority has made, which ignore realities to consider fictional straw men of libertarian construction). It turned out not to be fatal, which made us economists feel bad since we had expected the whole edifice to unravel if healthy young people could opt out. Evidently the penalty for opting out, which Roberts declared to "look like a tax," was sufficient to hold it together.

As well, the tussle over "vesting" and whether Congress can delegate power to determine the interpretation of statutes by administrative agencies gets a light brushover. This has recently been important as the ability of the EPA to set standards on carbon emissions was severely restricted by SCOTUS justices who neither understood the climate issue nor thought carefully about vesting and delegation. The muddle things were left in looks more like one of Roberts' half-assed efforts to straddle an issue than like anything one would call keen legal reasoning.
Post Reply

Return to “How to Read the Constitution -- and Why - by Kim Wehle”