Comment by tmaly
8 years ago
This was from the famous Stitch in Time that Saved Nine. Since the US Constitution does not put a limit on the number of Supreme Court justices, FDR threatened to increase the number and stack the court in his favor if they did not rule in his favor.
Given my understanding of how lower courts work on case law, this set a whole bunch of biased precedents from this one ruling. The ability of California to set good environmental law could still prevail if they could get a ruling using some other way like the 10th amendment.
Commerce Clause jurisprudence is all over the place. For any given Commerce Clause case you pick as your example of how it's "gone too far this time!" (or "not gone too far enough!"), there'll be another one you can pick that's exactly the opposite.
Even the same general panel of judges will about-face on it sometimes.