660
Breyer, J., dissenting
Virtually all local activity, when instances are aggregated, can have "substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption." Hence Congress could "regulate any crime," and perhaps "marriage, divorce, and child-rearing" as well, obliterating the "Constitution's distinction between national and local authority." Ante, at 615, 616; Lopez, 514 U. S., at 558; cf. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495, 548 (1935) (need for distinction between "direct" and "indirect" effects lest there "be virtually no limit to the federal power"); Hammer v. Dagen-hart, 247 U. S. 251, 276 (1918) (similar observation).
This consideration, however, while serious, does not reflect a jurisprudential defect, so much as it reflects a practical reality. We live in a Nation knit together by two centuries of scientific, technological, commercial, and environmental change. Those changes, taken together, mean that virtually every kind of activity, no matter how local, genuinely can affect commerce, or its conditions, outside the State—at least when considered in the aggregate. Heart of Atlanta Motel, 379 U. S., at 251. And that fact makes it close to impossible for courts to develop meaningful subject-matter categories that would exclude some kinds of local activities from ordinary Commerce Clause "aggregation" rules without, at the same time, depriving Congress of the power to regulate activities that have a genuine and important effect upon interstate commerce.
Since judges cannot change the world, the "defect" means that, within the bounds of the rational, Congress, not the courts, must remain primarily responsible for striking the appropriate state/federal balance. Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 552 (1985); ante, at 645-649 (Souter, J., dissenting); Kimel v. Florida Bd. of Regents, 528 U. S. 62, 93-94 (2000) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (Framers designed important structural safeguards to ensure that, when Congress legislates, "the normal operation of the legislative process itself would adequately defend
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