#commerce clause

NJ Gov Murphy Signs EO To Stop Gun Owners From Getting Insurance

NJ Gov Murphy signed an Executive Order that prohibits any company from “encouraging the use of a firearm” by insuring legal gun owners.  They falsely believe that it’s “murder insurance” and promotes gun violence.

Press release Sept 10: “Governor Phil Murphy today signed Executive Order No. 83, directing the New Jersey Department of Treasury, the Division of Purchase and Property, and the New…

By Hilary Bricken Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services recommended to the Drug Enforcement Administration that cannabis be rescheduled on the Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”) from a I to a III. At the same time, the SAFER Banking Act is winding its way through the Senate. And as of October 26, the cannabis industry will try to end prohibition through the courts. Cannabis…

Ian Millhiser at Vox: 

Justices from both political parties appeared bewildered during oral arguments in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, a case the Supreme Court heard on Tuesday which asks whether California is permitted to enact an animal cruelty law that, at least according to many of the nation’s pork farmers, could fundamentally change how pork is produced in all 50 states.

The immediate stakes in Pork Producers are whether a California law, that could lead to more humane farming conditions nationwide, should be struck down. The broader constitutional stakes, meanwhile, are absolutely enormous. They involve troublesome questions that arise when one state enacts a law that will have significant economic effects in the other 49 states.

The case appeared to divide the Court’s Republican-appointed majority, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch inclined to uphold the state law, and Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh opposed to it. That means that the Court’s three liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — could have an outsized ability to shape the outcome in Pork Producers.

But, while the three Democratic appointees initially seemed inclined to uphold California’s law, potentially forming a majority with Thomas and Gorsuch in the process, at least two of them seemed to vacillate by the end of the argument. Indeed, by lunchtime, both Kagan and Jackson appeared to be looking for a way to decide this case narrowly, putting the extraordinarily difficult constitutional questions raised by Pork Producers off until another day.

The most likely result is a narrow loss for the state, which will send the case back down to a trial court to determine whether the coalition of pork producers that challenged the law are correct that it will have severe economic effects on the nation’s pork markets. But that outcome is far from certain. And, if the Court does punt the case back down to a lower court, it very well may do so as a way to delay resolution of this challenging case.

California wants to ban pork that was produced under conditions it sees as inhumane

In 2018, California’s voters enacted Proposition 12, a ballot initiative that imposes strict animal welfare requirements on much of the meat sold in California. Among other things, Prop 12 forbids the sale of any pork in California unless the farm that produced that pork provided its breeding sows with at least “24 square feet of usable floor space per pig.”

The overwhelming majority of pork produced in the United States is produced outside of California. So this law primarily impacts pork farmers in the other 49 states.

The pork industry’s lawyers speak of Prop 12 in almost apocalyptic terms, claiming that it will “increase farmers’ production costs by over $13 per pig, a 9.2% cost increase.” They also claim that it is “impracticable” for pork farmers to know in advance which cuts of pork will ultimately be sold in California — so the farmers will have no choice but to raise all of their pigs in compliance with Prop 12.

But this claim — essentially an argument that California’s law could raise the price of bacon by nearly 10 percent in all 50 states — has never been tested. And at least some large pork producers have put out statements that seem to contradict the pork industry’s alarming economic claims. For this reason, the easiest way for the Court to resolve the Pork Producers case would be to simply send it back down to a trial court and require the pork industry to actually prove that their economic predictions are reliable before the case proceeds.

Should the pork producers do so, however — or should the Court decide to bypass this trial and rule immediately on the constitutional questions presented by the case — then the justices’ decision could transform each state’s relationship with the other 49 states. The justices spent Tuesday morning struggling with the question of just how much one state’s law may impact the economy of other states. And they received few good answers to this question.

I'm actually serious, though it sounds a bit odd this case actually has a ton of really odd implications for the US economy and the ability of states to pass laws regulating commerce.

The short version is that California passed a law requiring minimum standards for pig enclosures for any pig products sold in the state. Pork producers from other states sued saying that, since there was no way for them to know which pig products would end up in California, California basically passed a national pig regulation in defiance of what's called the "dormant commerce clause".

The dormant commerce clause, for those who are unaware as I was, is basically an idea taken from the Commerce Clause in the Constitution which gives Congress the right to regulate commerce between states. Effectively, the inference here is that, since Congress CAN regulate that commerce, the individual states CANNOT.

But here's the thing, literally everything a state does has at least some effect on other states. If one state has blue laws, for example, it will affect liquor sales on the border areas with states that don't. The key question in this case seems to be: how much can one state's regulations affect commerce in other states before they are in violation of the dormant commerce clause? Or, in the view of some justices, is the dormant commerce clause a valid reading of the Constitution in the first place?

So yeah, this case is about pigs, but it has huge implications for just about anything states might do that affects other states. Can an anti-abortion state ban travel for pregnant women to pro-abortion states? Can a pro-union state ban products produced by non-union workers? The amount of dominos that could fall from this case are oddly wide-ranging.

Anyways, that's my short version of it, if you're interested in the long version this is the best article I've found so far: