Note the article from JOC Daily Newswire regarding U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the ATA and National Chamber of Commerce challenge to 9th Circuit’s decision upholding LA’s clean truck program.
Lincoln famously said on the fall of Vicksburg that the Father of Waters could again roll unvexed to the sea. Municipal and State and Regional government have vexed commerce with new regulations contrary to Secretary Mineta’s signature “deregulation” legislation, especially in California, strangling the free flow of commerce in oceans of red tape, adding burdens to transport that Congress sought to dispel when it deregulated planes, trains, buses, and trucks. Federal deregulation of transport was not supposed to be a green light to local government to re-regulate, hobbling commerce recently freed by the deregulators.
When the federal king said deregulation is our commercial path, it was improper for the States and locals to create new roadblocks to the flow of people and goods, and only made everything more expensive.
Commerce Clause jurisprudence since Mr. Chief Justice John Marshall’s “steamboat case,” Gibbons v. Ogden 1824), has taken a federal trajectory, giving the feds the final say on interstate and foreign commerce, not the State or local municipal government. If this path remains the USA’s course for commerce, then we will see another 9th Circuit decision overruled by the Supreme Court. For the good of the nation, our commerce must flow un-vexed by government as it can possibly be. Caveat viator.
Joseph P. Thompson, Tres Pinos
