a Constitutional amendment was required to regulate a drug. Now we have Federal regulations for everything plausibly associated with “health”. What happened?
In 1942 the Supreme Court overturned 150 years of Constitutional precedent and granted unlimited Congressional authority by re-interpreting the Commerce Clause. The Wickard v. Filburn decision essentially allowed any interaction that could possibly affect interstate commerce to fall under the regulatory control of Congress. In the case of Obamacare, the government argues that our individual decision whether or not to buy health insurance, and what health insurance we buy, comes under the complete control of Congress. Under Wickard v. Filburn, the government is right and that is why the power of Congress has grown exponentially over they past 70+ years.
However, the passage of Obamacare gives us standing to legally challenge the 1942 Wickard v. Filburn decision. Liberty Legal Foundation is seeking to overturn Wickard so that Congress returns to its pre-1942 Constitutional limits.
We need your help for this lawsuit to win! If you want Congress to return to its Constitutional limits, join us in asking the court to overturn Wickard by becoming a member of the Obamacare Class Action today! Go to the Become a Member page to join.
Here’s a brief history of Wickard v. Filburn:
Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer growing wheat to feed his chickens, livestock, and family during the Great Depression. In order to drive up wheat prices, the U.S. government had imposed limits on farmers’ wheat production. Roscoe was growing more than they government permitted, so the Department of Agriculture ordered Roscoe to destroy his crops and pay a fine. Keep in mind, Filburn was only producing the excess wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it.
Rather than pay the fine and destroy food during a food shortage, Roscoe sued the Federal government arguing that the “Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938” was beyond the Constitutional authority of Congress. Filburn argued that because the excess wheat was produced for his private consumption on his own farm, it never entered commerce at all, much less interstate commerce, and therefore was not subject to Federal regulation under the Commerce Clause.
The Federal District Court ruled in favor of Filburn. The government then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which called District Court’s holding against the Department of Agriculture a “manifest error.” The court went on to uphold the Act under the Interstate Commerce Clause. The Supreme Court decided that, because Filburn’s wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn’s production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce, and could be regulated by the federal government.
Note that when the Wickard v. Filburn case reached the Supreme Court the Department of Agriculture had asserted a defense that would have caused the case to be thrown out, but then the Ag. Dept. mysteriously waived its defense. You see, the fix was in. For several years before Wickard v. Filburn, the FDR Supreme Court had been deciding cases that dramatically increased Congressional authority. One wonder’s if the Department of Agriculture somehow knew that Wickard v. Filburn would go their way in the Supreme Court. The FDR administration certainly wanted a case that would sweep away any remaining remnants of the old Republic’s Constitutional limitations and empower Congress to do whatever it wanted. With a World War raging, and the outcome of that war uncertain, 1942 was the perfect time to centralize power in DC. Unfortunately this fundamental shift in power went unnoticed. The government of our Founding Fathers was swept away and our history classes never reported it in our government funded schools.
