Last Friday, I appeared on an episode of Eric Segall’s podcast Supreme Myths. Most of the conversation was about my view of congressional power. In a series of articles published over the last several years, and in a forthcoming book, I advance the view that orthodox ideas about Congress’s being limited by its enumerated powers are systematically misconceived. Among other things, I think that on the best interpretation of the Constitution, Congress has non-enumerated as well as enumerated powers. It doesn’t follow that Congress has a police power, but I do think that the scope of Congress’s legislative jurisdiction is very broad. I won’t try to lay out the full view and its supporting reasons in this post. Readers who want to hear the podcast episode can find it here; readers who want a more complete exposition of my view can read things like this, and this, and this. Or they can wait for the book. In this post, I’m writing to respond to a useful question that Orin Kerr posed after hearing the podcast episode.
The question is whether, on my view, Congress could enact a general preemption statute that would nullify all state legislation, or at least all state legislation not falling within express constitutional language directing that certain legislation be done by states. In a short Twitter thread, Orin presented this question as follows:
Let’s say Congress passes a new law, the State Law Is Dumb Act (SLID). It provides: “All state law of any kind on any topic is expressly preempted.” I take it Congress can’t do this now because the federal government has limited power under the “enumeration” understanding of Article I; Congress can only preempt where it has power to regulate, which is limited.
Here’s the general shape of my answer. First, I’m going to affirm the suspicion that animates the question, which is that on my view Congress would have the authority to eliminate or at least radically reduce the ability of state and local governments to act as consequential policymakers—and that that would be a bad thing. Second, I’m going to explain why this possibility isn’t a problem for my theory. Third, I’m going to point out that the concern animating this question echoes a common concern about the scope of congressional power in the eras before the New Deal, and I’m going to suggest that just as we today can easily see the solution to the pre-New Deal concern, we should be able to see why we shouldn’t be worried about something like SLID.
So first: Yes, on my view of congressional power,
Congress could preempt an awful lot of state law. Not all
of state law, but an awful lot of it. It
is not my view that the Constitution properly interpreted vests Congress with a
police power, and even if Congress had a police power, there would be
affirmative constitutional prohibitions against Congress’s displacing several
core pockets of state law. (Two
examples: Under Article I, Section iv, Congress cannot override a state law
designating the places at which states choose their U.S. Senators, and under Coyle v. Oklahoma Congress cannot designate
the location of a state capital.) But I
do think that Congress has legislative power at least as broad as indicated in
decisions like Wickard v. Filburn and
Katzenbach v. McClung, that the individual
mandate of the ACA was easily within Congress’s power to enact under the
Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses, that Congress should be understood
to possess some amount of legislative power beyond that which the text of the
Constitution expressly specifies, and that it is not necessarily the case that
any particular policymaking domain is beyond the reach of congressional legislation,
excepting those domains that are the subjects of affirmative constitutional
prohibitions (textual or otherwise) on federal lawmaking. Again, I don’t intend to explain or defend
these conclusions here. I mean just to
acknowledge that those are my views and that if those views prevailed, Congress
could enact extremely broad preemptive legislation. Something as totalizing as SLID would still
be overreach, but maybe not by much. A
slightly moderated version—call it AASLID, for Almost All State Law Is Dumb—would
be within Congress’s power. And AASLID’s
preemption would be bad, because there’s a lot of value in having a lot of
consequential policymaking done at the state and local levels.
But second: The fact that Congress has the power to enact
a destructive law doesn’t always point to a problem, let alone an incorrect
interpretation of the Constitution.
Congress has the power to tax all American incomes at 99%, and it would
bad for Congress to do so. Ditto for the
power to prohibit all commercial activity on Thursdays and the power to
completely disband the U.S. military.
But none of these facts about congressional authority is a problem,
because Congress isn’t going to do any of those things. No plausibly foreseeable congressional majority
would want to do them, and any momentarily insane Congress that tried would be
quickly turned out by the voters. (I’m not
saying that congressional behavior reliably consists of reasonably people
pursuing reasonable ends reasonably. But
there are limits to how pathologically Congress will behave, even under the distinctly
unfortunate conditions of 2023.) The
constitutional system has several mechanisms for avoiding bad legislation, and
the most important mechanisms are process limits, like the fact that large
numbers of actual officeholders have to vote for something before it becomes
law. That limit, rather than anything
about the scope of congressional authority, is the thing that prevents most of
the bad things that Congress could theoretically do. And I’m confident that it would prevent
Congress from enacting something like AASLID, even if my view of congressional
power were accepted.
One way to explain why I’m confident on that matter is to
point out that Congress has never legislated anywhere near the limits of its
preemptive authority. Even on the
orthodox view by which Congress is limited to and by its textually enumerated
powers, Congress has the authority to preempt enormous swaths of state and
local law. All of contract law could be preempted
under Congress’s power to regulate commerce (or, if you follow Justice Scalia’s
analysis in Gonzales v. Raich,
Congress’s power to regulate commerce combined with its power under the Necessary
and Proper Clause). The same is true for
all of corporate law, employment law, products liability law, professional
licensing, and all other law connected to the production and consumption of
goods and services, not to mention traffic safety law and all other law
connected to transportation (including, say, the licensing of drivers). A creative legislative drafter using the
techniques that Congress used to reenact most of the coverage of the Gun-Free
School Zones Act after United States v.
Lopez could easily reach many more things, too. Given Congress’s ability to attach conditions
to the receipt of federal funds, Congress could probably also preempt a much
broader subset of state regulation than it currently does in domains like
education, policing, firefighting, environmental protection, and on and
on. But it doesn’t. To be sure, there’s a bunch of federal
preemption, and some of it is unfortunate, and different people will have
different views about where it goes too far (or not far enough). But in the aggregate, Congress leaves a great
deal of state law standing in areas where it has the constitutional authority
to preempt state law. It does so for a
combination of reasons: because the federal government lacks the resources to
regulate all those domains effectively, because Congress thinks it would be
unwise to federalize all those domains, because Congress correctly perceives
that there would be strong political resistance to federalization, and so
forth.
The point is that whatever limiting force the
Constitution’s enumeration of congressional powers has is not what prevents
Congress from preempting most state law.
Most state law exists in a zone of concurrent jurisdiction, where the
state and national legislatures are both competent to regulate and state law
operates to the extent that it is not inconsistent with national law. For good reasons, Congress has let most of
that law stand. And there is no reason
to think that the reasons why Congress does not displace most state law would
disappear if we acknowledged that the Constitution’s enumeration of
congressional powers should not be thought to constrain Congress in the way
that prevailing doctrine holds. Congress
would have somewhat broader authority, but the incentives and other dynamics
that prevent unlimited preemption over the domain of Congress’s already wide
authority would still be in force. Yes,
in theory a future Congress not constrained by enumerated powers could go crazy
and enact AASLID, just as Congress today could go crazy and disband the U.S.
military. But if we think it’s possible
that a Congress not constrained by its enumerated powers could go crazy and
preempt everything within its legislative reach, we should also think it’s
possible that a Congress operating within current enumerated-powers limits
(whatever they might be) might similarly go crazy and preempt everything within
its legislative reach—and that
preemption too would be plenty broad enough to be a terrible idea. We don’t seem to be worried that that will happen,
though, and rightly not. It’s not going
to happen, even though Congress has the authority to do it. And if we see that we don’t need a judicially
enforceable rule preventing Congress from legislating to the limits of its
preemptive authority in our current world, even though it’d be terrible for
Congress to do that, we should be able to see that for the same reasons we
wouldn’t need a judicially enforceable rule preventing Congress from
legislating to the limits of its preemptive authority in a world where Congress’s
legislative authority was somewhat broader than the extremely broad authority
it already enjoys. We don’t need judicially
enforceable rules preventing that legislation any more than we need a
judicially enforceable rule preventing Congress from enacting a 99% income tax.
Third: The worry that Congress might destroy American
federalism by enacting preemptive legislation to the full extent of its
legislative mandate is a modern version of a worry that preoccupied some
jurists during the Constitution’s first hundred and fifty years. During that earlier period, many people
thought of federal legislative jurisdiction—either in its entirety or in some
of its most important parts—as inherently exclusive of state jurisdiction,
rather than as existing concurrently with it.
Some members of the Founding generation assumed that giving any particular
policymaking domain to the federal government meant withdrawing that domain
from the state governments and therefore opposed extending federal power not
because they feared the federal government would govern abusively but because
given the federal government’s limited practical capacity it was implausible
that the federal government alone could regulate adequately, so disabling state
regulation meant that domains of social life needing regulation for the public
welfare would be dangerously neglected.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many judges thought
that anything coming within Congress’s commerce power could not be regulated by
states, and that made it imperative to construe the commerce power narrowly,
lest dormant commerce preemption nullify massive amounts of local regulation
that Congress could not plausibly replace.
Often, that's what courts between 1890 and 1937 had in mind when they
wrote that on a more expansive view of the commerce power, the American constitutional
system would be destroyed: not that letting Congress regulate would be
tantamount to that destruction, but that eliminating state policymaking would
be.
The
transition to modern commerce doctrine was made possible partly by the legal
profession’s acceptance of the model of concurrent jurisdiction, on which the
fact that Congress can regulate something under its commerce power doesn’t
deprive the states of the power to regulate in the same domain. Once we accept that the existence of federal
legislative authority does not by itself eliminate state policymaking, the
imperative to preserve meaningful state policymaking only requires constraining
the scope of federal legislative authority if we expect that Congress will in
fact occupy too much of the policymaking space to which it has access. For more than eighty years, constitutional
law has operated on the correct understanding that Congress will in fact not
occupy anything close to all of that space, even though it has the authority to
do so. And the fact that Congress will
not occupy anything close to all of that space is a robust feature of the
system, rather than a matter of happenstance or easily revoked grace. Put differently, part of what has kept the
states meaningful policymakers in the last eighty years is the reality that the
system has features other than enumeration-based constraints that prevent
Congress from overriding most of state legislation. That being the case, there is little reason
to worry about SLID or AASLID.
So:
Yes, wall-to-wall preemption would be bad.
So would the massive amount of preemption that Congress could legislate
tomorrow, with no changes to current ideas about enumerated powers. The fact that we don’t find that last
possibility terribly worrisome—and we shouldn’t—indicates that it isn’t the
constraining force of enumerated powers that gives us reassurance.