Wickard is Claud Wickard who was the Secretary of Agriculture under the Roosevelt Administration.
Filburn is Roscoe Filburn, who was an Ohio farmer.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed during the Depression as a way of stabilizing
farm prices and by stabilizing they mean increase farm prices so that farmers who were a very
important voting constituency, uh, would have a steady source of income and they did that
by restricting the supply of farm goods, of farm produce, um, in order to raise the prices
of farm produce.
The case involved a quota on wheat production that was imposed on Roscoe Filburn.
He was allotted a certain amount of what that he could grow and he planted that wheat and
he additionally planted a number of acres of wheat over and above, and he used that
wheat on his own farm, but the record shows that he did sell some of his wheat in interstate
commerce, but he used other parts of his wheat to feed his own produce, which consisted of
dairy cows that produced milk and chicken, which produced eggs.
So, the question is, did Congress have the authority to reach, not the wheat that he
marketed in interstate commerce or sold as wheat, but the wheat that he used on the farm,
even though the wheat that he produced would have had a minuscule effect on interstate
commerce?
The idea that Congress could reach local activity, even activity as trivial as Roscoe Filburn's
growing of wheat, was quite radical and a difficult case for the Court to decide.
It actually held the case over for re-argument to a second term because it was unable to
reach that conclusion the first time it heard the case.
We'd have the memos written by the justices, which shows how anguished they were in extending
Congress' power as far as they did.
Justice Jackson at one point thought the court really ought to be candid and say, you know,
"When it comes to the national economy, we just leave it to Congress.”
But that's not what the Court actually ended up holding in Wickard versus Filburn.
The Court held that Congress could reach even Roscoe Filburn's activity, which itself had
a trivial effect on interstate commerce because it establishes what's known as the aggregation
principle and that allows, um, the federal government to reach even activity that has
a minuscule, or trivial, or even nonexistent effect on interstate commerce because when
all that activity is aggregated, all the similar activity is aggregated, then the activity
as a group has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
And this is what the court said was going to evade the regulatory scheme and it was
necessary under the Necessary and Proper Clause for the Congress to reach that activity.
Now, the reason why the case is sometimes mistaught is because the court doesn't talk
about the necessary and proper clause.
It only talks about the commerce clause, so it's easy to think that it expanded the meaning
of the commerce clause.
But in the Darby case, on which Wickard relies, the court relied on the authority of McCulloch
versus Maryland to justify the substantial effects doctrine that allowed Congress to
reach activity that was not commerce but had a substantial effect on commerce.
Both cases were really dependent on the necessary and proper clause, which says that Congress
shall have the power to make laws that are necessary and proper for executing its powers
that are found elsewhere in the Constitution.
For example, the commerce power.
In a way, you can think of the enumeration of powers in Article I Section 8 and as the
appropriate objects or purposes of laws that are passed by Congress and the necessary and
proper clause makes it clear that Congress has the power to pass laws, to pursue those
objects or purposes.
By allowing Congress to reach activity as trivial as a single farmer's production of
wheat to feed his own livestock, Wickard versus Filburn profoundly expanded the reach of Congress'
power the national economy.