State's Rights

Banned Wheat

We’ll see if the benefits of the Obama Administration are worth the damage he is sure to cause.  But assuredly one  of the very VEST things to happen as a result of him is the awakening of the American Dynamism.  The idea that WE are in control of our lives and choices.  And one of the leaders in this awakening is an unlikely State:  Minnesota.

Out with the new. In with the old.

Minnesota is dominated by the urban Twin Cites and rural farmers.  Large cities tend to be full of Liberals.  Farmers and agriculture are one of the Left’s favorite special interest groups.  I find it strange the Blue to the Bone Minnesota is leading the charge in the State’s Rights battle.

State Rep. Dean Urdahl has a message for the federal government: Keep your laws off my light bulbs.

The retired teacher from Grove City — along with state Rep. Tom Emmer, a Republican candidate for governor — has drawn a new weapon in the battle to beat back the hand of the federal government: incandescent light bulbs, the kind that have been around for a century.

A handful of GOP lawmakers have launched a legislative crusade to let Minnesotans keep buying conventional light bulbs after the federal government orders lights-out on selling old bulbs in 2014.

“The real problem I have with this ban is it’s another instance of government creeping even further into our lives,” he said. “Our Founding Fathers would be dismayed if they knew Washington is reaching so far into our lives as to control the light bulbs we use.”

The key to the battle is gonna be the Federal ability to control interstate commerce, a role of the Congress spelled out in the Constitution.  Cases like this have come before the Supreme Court before; and lost:

the case of Wickard v. Filburn. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 imposed a nation-wide set of quotas limiting the amount of wheat and other crops that farmers could grow. A farmer named Filburn operated a small farm in Montgomery County, Ohio, maintaining a herd of dairy cattle, selling milk, raising poultry, and selling poultry and eggs.

In July of 1940, Mr. Filburn was told of his allotment permitting him to grow a limited amount of wheat during the 1941 season. Mr. Wickard grew 239 bushels, which was more than this allotted amount of wheat permitted, and he was charged with growing too much wheat by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under the authority of its Secretary Wickard.

None of the wheat was sold in interstate commerce. In fact, all the wheat was fed to Wickard’s cattle on his own property. Thus, the wheat grown by Filburn never actually left his farm and was not sold in intra-state, much less interstate commerce.

The fact that Farmer Filburn never sold any of the wheat, but merely fed it to his cattle, meant that this was not really commerce, either. Filburn argued that Congress was attempting to regulate merely the “consumption” of wheat — not commerce (marketing) of wheat. Thus, Filburn argued, the regulation should fail both because (a) the activity was not interstate, and (b) it was not commerce.

If this case will be used as precedent there will be little hope that the bill will pass muster.  After all, if a farmer can’t grow wheat that he doesn’t plan to sell on his own private property, what hope do we have?

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