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ship between the national government and the States that occurred in the
1930s, when Congress, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, decided it was necessary, in response to the Great Depression, to expand its
commerce power to establish welfare and public work programs, and to
regulate agricultural production, the labor force, transportation, and many
other activities that had previously been under State control. The Supreme
Court’s new interpretation of Congress’s power to regulate commerce
among the States allowed the Federal government to gain control of virtually the entire commercial life of the nation, including many aspects of
intrastate commerce wholly within one State, and a wide variety of other
activities local in nature and only indirectly related to commerce, such as
wildlife protection, flood and watershed projects, mountain streams,
housing, even civil rights. After 1937, the Supreme Court, in a series of
landmark decisions reversing many earlier cases, adopted the view that
Congress was free to use its commerce power to regulate any activity
that, in one way or another, might ‘‘affect’’ commerce. The Tenth Amendment, said the Court in United States v. Darby (1941), does not limit the
commerce power and ‘‘states but a truism that all is retained which has
not been surrendered.’’ In only one case between 1937 and 1995 did the
court strike down a Federal law under the commerce clause, and even
that decision was subsequently overruled. In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985), the Supreme Court rejected the proposition
that the Constitution places independent limits on Congress’s commerce
power, holding that participation by the States in the national political
process is the only protection against Federal encroachments on their reserved powers. This may not be very reassuring to the States. Before the
adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, members of the Senate were
elected by the State legislatures. Now they are elected directly by the people. The effect of this amendment has been to weaken the influence of the
States in the national political process.
More recently, the Supreme Court has indicated that it may be moving
away from the latitudinarian interpretation of the Commerce Clause it
has followed during the last half century. Without reversing any earlier
decisions, the Court ruled in United States v. Lopez (1995) that the power
to regulate commerce among the States did not give Congress the authority to ban the mere possession of a firearm in a school zone. The Gun