foreign powers of the Congress is the commerce power Article 1 Section 8 Clause 3 which gives Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce the commerce power was not very clearly defined in the Constitution and like so many other parts of the Constitution it's taken years decades even centuries of practice to determine what some of those provisions mean in terms of the Commerce Clause it was about eight it was the 1820s when we started to really understand what it meant for Congress to have the authority to regulate commerce and in the 1824 case Gibbons V Ogden the U.S Supreme Court clarified that Congress could regulate inter-state commerce that is commerce between the states but that States retain the authority to regulate intrastate Commerce which is any internal commercial activity within a state's borders that seems like it should be pretty straightforward but over time questions began to develop over what really was Interstate versus what was intrastate so for example is manufacturing an item within a state solely an intrastate activity if the materials that were needed came from someplace else so over time Congress actually began to regulate more and more dimensions of commercial activity under its Authority in Article 1 Section 8 class 3. and today Congress has broad Authority Under the Commerce Clause to impose regulations on Commercial activity this makes sense if you think about how Commerce takes place now we sit on our computers and we order something from amazon.com and while we're engaging in that activity in a very local way there's probably a global supply chain that's involved with that commercial act so Congress has broad authority to be involved with lots of different elements of those activities the first case that really come where this issue comes to a head is in Gibbons V Ogden in New York in 1824. and here's a case in which you have a steamboat operator Mr Ogden who essentially has Monopoly power to run his steamship from New York in along the Hudson River into New Jersey okay so he's actually Crossing from one state to another and Congress obviously is dealing here with a case of navigable Waters where boats are moving from one state to the other clearly a case of interstate commerce Interstate transaction Mr Gibbons comes along and says well I want to have the right to run a steamship as well and he fails in a couple of rounds in the in the state court and even in federal court but he eventually makes it to the Supreme Court and Marshall once again a federalist says you know look we need to have uniform laws dealing with interstate commerce and he uses the interstate commerce clause to justify the congress's power to regulate the state state laws and in this case obviously breaking down the Monopoly which existed that gave Mr Ogden his power in the first place and has said to Mr Gibbons you know under the Constitution you actually have a right to operate your boat and that becomes the beginning of a essentially a long period where Congress uh is essentially given a significant amount of power to do uh most of what it wants now keep in mind that throughout most of the well through the first half of the 19th century you essentially have a federalist Arrangement where uh this the federal government is not really doing very much period and the states are able to pass laws and to essentially maintain their local economies without too much difficulty and so for a good period of time there's not a lot of controversy you you get into issues of interstate commerce with industrialization right Congress begins to have to step in because now the country is growing substantially population growth uh is is key and you you have people moving Westward you have cities that are growing up in New York and Boston you have companies that are now building industrial bases in various places and so Congress now needs to get much more involved you actually begin to see trust being built up and Monopoly is starting to be built up throughout most of the uh throughout parts of the late 19th century and early 20th century Sherman Antitrust Act is a good example and so Congress now has to get involved in regulating on a much more active basis as the economy grows and it becomes more Diversified and essentially all the way up into the 1930s the court essentially allows Congress pretty much to decide what to do personally I think the the most and one of the most interesting examples has to do with the passage of the Civil Rights Act um which is cast in part as a matter of the Commerce Clause because the the framing of the framing of the Civil Rights Act is um what you can and can't do if you're engaged in interstate commerce and the main thing you can't do if you're engaged in interstate commerce is you can't discriminate based on race and other conditions now the question is what is interstate commerce well it turns out that no man or woman is an island and try as you might not to engage in interstate commerce you have a phone you're engaged in interstate commerce you use a bottle of ketchup that comes from Pennsylvania you're engaged in interstate commerce so it's virtually impossible not to be engaged in interstate commerce and so we take a bill that some people at the time might have argued that was not quite within the purview it was in the written Constitution it gets folded into the Commerce Clause and suddenly Congress is able to to act in a wide variety of ways and you can kind of go you can kind of go down the list for instance you can also end up criminalizing under the federal statutes a lot of laws that congress used to have say nothing about you know there used to be a division between the states and the federal government over the police power but it turns out that Firearms travel in interstate commerce so so over the last several decades as well Federal criminal law has has developed and Congress has gotten involved in in writing new Federal Criminal statutes to federalize a lot of criminal law because a lot of crimes are committed using firearms and if they travel in interstate commerce that gives a a opening for congress then to start writing a new new types of criminal law that they never could have written before in the 19th and 20th centuries the Supreme Court looked at a number of different ways that Congress had tried to engage in regulation of interstate commerce Congress had enacted legislation involving a minimum wage it had enacted legislation that would ban child labor it enacted legislation that was aimed at improving working conditions and originally all of those laws were challenged as an unconstitutional use of the Commerce Clause Authority the Supreme Court disagreed with that in all of those cases the court came back and said no Congress can regulate these things because it's a regulation on instruments of Commerce or regulations on the means of engaging in commercial production and so those are examples of types of things Congress has used the Commerce Clause to try to regulate and and where Congress has been successful the Supreme Court and Congress have been jockeying back and forth recently over what's an appropriate use of congress's Commerce Clause Authority in the mid 90s Congress passed two laws one was the gun-free School Zones Act the other was the violence against women act and tried to claim that some of the penalties that they were imposing were being imposed using their Commerce Clause Authority and ultimately the Supreme Court struck both of those down as being an unconstitutional use of Commerce Clause Authority on the other hand more recently you have the Supreme Court upholding congress's right under the Controlled Substances Act to regulate medicinal marijuana grown entirely within a state that has approved marijuana for that purpose but at the same time just recently in the Affordable Care Act the court struck down congress's use of the Commerce Clause to justify requiring people to purchase health insurance the court said that Congress could do that but only using its taxation power not using its Commerce Clause Authority so I think right now we're in a period of time where the courts in Congress are trying to work through exactly what that Commerce Clause Authority really means sure