Commerce Clause Research 5-5-2015 #11

[9-7-2025: I am going through my prison journal, but this is not part of that journal. The federal government provided us with a free law library - LexisNexis, to be precise - and there came a time I decided to research the law that got me into prison, the Constitution's Commerce Clause. In law school, they teach us the law as it is, for that is what we must deal with for our clients. I took a slightly different approach, what I call a genealogical approach. Long ago, but after law school, I learned there is often a drift in judicial interpretations. This drift was not part of my education. That it happens is not as much a concern as where the law is at the time one has a case; the main stream of interpretation and any anomalies. My public defender had given me Gonzales v. Raich to read while in was in pretrial detention in 2010; four years later, I decided to find the sources of that case. My conclusion to all this research (and there will be a lot of this to post) is that the United Supreme Court has expanded and extended the Commerce Clause into a national police power that is not curbed by any constitutional provision, only by the political will of Congress, and can bring the power of the federal government into the most minute aspect of American lives. I thought that terrifying in 2014; today it poses a horrendous threat.

I will note that this present post may well be the rawest version of the notes. However, time and the mailing around and the shifts in their storage will make these posts messy. That and their apparent irrelevance to the lives of most people will probably drive most of you away from reading them. I ask for your patience, for they are relevant to your lives, since your lives are tangled in the jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause. 

While typing the previous section, I ran across the date of 6/1/12, so these notes may be even older, but I see no other dates and so will leave the title unchanged. The following paragraphs begin with the page number of 49. As I said, the originals are in a messy condition.

Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917) is the most important Commerce Clause case I never heard mentioned in law school, and is the key to modern Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

I will finish this part as I always preface my prison journal entries: What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.

sch.]

The remaining "channels of interstate commerce" cases exhibit some of the same characteristic as the earlier cases. Moskal v. United States, 498 U.S. 103 (1990) and McElroy v. United States, 455 U.S. 642 (1982) interpreted the same National Stolen Property Act, and both cases imported "channels of interstate commerce" from United States v. Sheridan, 329 U. S. 379, 329 U. S. 384 (1946).

Through § 2314, Congress has sought to aid the States in their detection and punishment of criminals who evade state authorities by using the channels of interstate commerce. Based on this congressional purpose, the trial judge in the present case correctly instructed the jury that they could find the petitioner guilty of violating § 2314 if they found that the forgeries occurred during the course of interstate commerce, which includes a "continuation of a movement that began out of state," even though movement of the forged checks was restricted to one State. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the court below.

 McElroy at 659.

 McElroy had this to say about the facts of the case in footnote 19:

The facts of the present case illustrate this point. The petitioner, who lived in Ohio at the time he forged the Union checks, see Tr. 16A, brought the stolen checks from Ohio into Pennsylvania. He forged them at an unknown time and place to purchase a boat and a car. Requiring prosecutors to prove on which side of the border the petitioner forged the checks, when in fact the petitioner had transported the forged checks in continuation of a longer interstate journey, serves no purpose. In addition, as the supporters of the Dyer Act recognized, federal authority may be necessary to investigate fully the crime and to compel witnesses from other States to testify. See 58 Cong.Rec. 5475 (1919) (remarks of Rep. Newton) ("all the witnesses from anywhere in the United States can be compelled to appear and testify [before the grand jury], and a full and complete investigation can be had in every case, and when a case is called for trial, the barrier of the State line having been swept away, the witnesses will be compelled to appear and testify in open court"). Absent federal jurisdiction, it may have been impossible, or at the least extraordinarily difficult, to compel Union and bank officials from Ohio to testify in a Pennsylvania state court that the checks had been stolen, when they had been stolen, when the bank account had been closed, that the signature on the checks had been forged, and that the petitioner had no authority to write those checks.

There is no foundation for the fear expressed in the dissenting opinion that our decision today is a broad expansion of federal jurisdiction in criminal law. Post at 455 U. S. 660. The implications of this case are limited by the facts and its holding that the forged check was transported in interstate commerce only because that transportation was a continuation of a longer journey that began out of state. If the entire transaction -- obtaining and forging the checks, purchasing the car and boat, and returning the checks to the bank for collection -- had occurred solely within Ohio, it seems clear that the checks would not have been "transport[ed] in interstate commerce."....

Justice Stevens dissents, relying also on the Sheridan case, and critiques the majority's use of that opinion.

.... Ironically, this quote actually refutes the Court's position. The Court assumes, as it must, that the state offense committed by petitioner -- forging a check -- was committed in Pennsylvania, rather than in Ohio, from which petitioner commenced his interstate journey. This is not a case, therefore, in which the defendant's offense was complete under state law before he crossed state lines to make his getaway. Rather, this is a case in which the defendant crossed state lines and then committed the underlying state offense. It is even more ironic that, although the issue of the meaning of the interstate commerce phrase of § 2314 was not before the Court in Sheridan, the Court thrice referred to that element as the "interstate transportation" of forged securities. See 329 U.S. at 329 U. S. 384, 329 U. S. 385, 329 U. S. 387.... 

  McElroy at 674 (footnote omitted)

sch 

[Continued in Commerce Clause Research 5-5-2015 #12. sch 9/7/2025.]