The effect of the Commerce Clause on Federal and State governments
The ‘Commerce Clause’ states that the Congress of the U.S. has the power to control the trade and aids to trade (commerce) of America with foreign countries, states and native Indians (Ducat, 2009). Hence, the ‘Commerce Clause’ enables the congress to control the way American citizens do trade, as well as the aids to trade among different American-states and among American-citizens and foreign countries.
Trade is the swap of goods, services and/or money for other goods, services and/or money. Aids to trade are the facilities that enable successful trading. Examples of aids to trade include communication (telephone, internet, and letters), transport, porting and storage just to mention a few.
The ‘Commerce Clause’ does not say whether the Congress should control commerce exclusively or share the power with the State authority.
In a case where Congress controls commerce exclusively, the State authority cannot control commerce among states. This means that state authorities can do nothing on un-legislated interstate commerce issues. Otherwise, if the State Authority chose to act on un-legislated interstate commerce issues, their actions would be deemed as unconstitutional (Mallor, 2007). Thus Federal government’s interests on the states would override the interests on the State authorities on commerce related matters. Exclusive control of commerce by the Congress would lead to bureaucratic inconveniences.
On the other hand, if Congress and State authorities jointly controlled commerce, then there would be cases where a State has passed a law one a certain issue, but if the congress passed a law against the same issue that the State has passed as law, then the State law is deemed as unconstitutional. Joint Commerce control would result to conflict of interest in some cases.
The ‘Commerce Clause’ would work very well if bureaucracy and conflict of interest do not get in the way of passing economically empowering commerce laws. Therefore, joint consultations should be done before passing commerce laws.
References
Mallor, J. P. (2007). Business law: The ethical, global, and e-commerce environment. Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
Ducat, C. R. (2009). Constitutional interpretation. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
