Lesson Summary
In the throes of the Great Depression, the US government aimed to stabilize the agricultural market with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, leveraging its power to regulate interstate commerce. This Act enabled the USDA to set strict limits on wheat production among farmers, intending to control supply and, by extension, prices. Roscoe Filburn, a farmer from Ohio, found himself in hot water for exceeding these limits, using the surplus wheat solely for personal and on-farm purposes.
His argument that this private use fell outside federal jurisdiction was dismissed by the Supreme Court, which held that even non-commercial, locally consumed produce indirectly affected market demand and thus interstate commerce.
This landmark decision, Wickard v. Filburn, dramatically widened the scope of the Commerce Clause, setting a precedent for federal oversight into nearly all facets of life. Senator Mike Lee critiques this as a gross overreach, fundamentally altering the balance of state and federal powers, diluting the Tenth Amendment, and morphing the principle of federalism.
It paved the way for Congress to offload legislative responsibilities to bureaucratic agencies, thereby diluting accountability and eroding both economic and personal freedoms on a scale both vast and, in many ways, unquantifiable.
