Cite as: 514 U. S. 549 (1995)
Breyer, J., dissenting
together and considered as a whole, create a problem that causes serious human and social harm, but also has nationally significant economic dimensions.
In Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111 (1942), this Court sustained the application of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 to wheat that Filburn grew and consumed on his own local farm because, considered in its totality, (1) homegrown wheat may be "induced by rising prices" to "flow into the market and check price increases," and (2) even if it never actually enters the market, homegrown wheat nonetheless "supplies a need of the man who grew it which would otherwise be reflected by purchases in the open market" and, in that sense, "competes with wheat in commerce." Id., at 128. To find both of these effects on commerce significant in amount, the Court had to give Congress the benefit of the doubt. Why would the Court, to find a significant (or "substantial") effect here, have to give Congress any greater leeway? See also United States v. Women's Sportswear Mfrs. Assn., 336 U. S. 460, 464 (1949) ("If it is interstate commerce that feels the pinch, it does not matter how local the operation which applies the squeeze"); Mandeville Island Farms, Inc. v. American Crystal Sugar Co., 334 U. S., at 236 ("[I]t is enough that the individual activity when multiplied into a general practice . . . contains a threat to the interstate economy that requires preventive regulation").
The second legal problem the Court creates comes from its apparent belief that it can reconcile its holding with earlier cases by making a critical distinction between "commercial" and noncommercial "transaction[s]." Ante, at 561. That is to say, the Court believes the Constitution would distinguish between two local activities, each of which has an identical effect upon interstate commerce, if one, but not the other, is "commercial" in nature. As a general matter, this approach fails to heed this Court's earlier warning not to turn "questions of the power of Congress" upon "formula[s]" that would give
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