Jones & Laughlin And The Commerce Clause

Amy Davidson looks at another historic Supreme Court case dealing with the commerce clause:

If there had been Twitter, instead of news tickers, in February, 1937, reporters and other observers would have been using it to follow the arguments before the Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. It was the central case of five, argued in one extraordinary round, which challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act. The J. & L. dispute involved ten steelworkers who had been fired from the company’s Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, mills for trying to organize a union. As with this week’s hearings on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, those deliberations were being watched with an anxiety that extended well beyond any concern for the protagonists in the suit, or even the law in question, to an entire vision of government.
Jones & Laughlin and its companion cases involved the Commerce Clause, the constitutional conductor for a whole orchestra of New Deal programs and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s more urgent efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression. (It gives Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”) The post-1937 conception of the Commerce clause has, as Jeffrey Toobin noted yesterday, become an assumed part of any number of government efforts today; it is the defense for challenges to the individual mandate but also to other aspects of the A.C.A., like provisions protecting people with preëxisting conditions. Before the Supreme Court this week, as that assumption was challenged, there was a certain forgetfulness about what was at stake in Jones & Laughlin, both constitutionally and practically. Ten steelworkers have become phantoms, along with the four dissenting Justices who were almost joined by a fifth.

 I don't really know much about this case, but I do know a reasonable amount about J&L.  They had plants in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, before becoming part of LTV, then International Steel Group, and finally Mittal Steel.  The plants in Pittsburgh are gone, but the Supreme Court case is still alive in history.  If the Supreme Court decides to limit the commerce clause, they are tampering with a lot of history, and a lot of modern America.