[publius42]

Reading the Slaughterhouse opinion, I'm wondering: do we really want that reversed?

Some excerpts:

The exclusive authority of State legislation over this subject is strikingly illustrated in the case of the City of New York v. Miln. [n6] In that case, the defendant was prosecuted for failing to comply with a statute of New York which required of every master of a vessel arriving from a foreign port in that of New York City to report the names of all his passengers, with certain particulars of their age, occupation, last place of settlement, and place of their birth. It was argued that this act was an invasion of the exclusive right of Congress to regulate commerce. And it cannot be denied that such a statute operated at least indirectly upon the commercial intercourse between the citizens of the United States and of foreign countries. But notwithstanding this, it was held to be an exercise of the police power properly within the control of the State, and unaffected by the clause of the Constitution which conferred on Congress the right to regulate commerce. [p64]

To the same purpose are the recent cases of the The License Tax, [n7] and United States v. De Witt. [n8] In the latter case, an act of Congress which undertook as a part of the internal revenue laws to make it a misdemeanor to mix for sale naphtha and illuminating oils, or to sell oil of petroleum inflammable at less than a prescribed temperature, was held to be void because, as a police regulation, the power to make such a law belonged to the States, and did not belong to Congress.

Wow is all I can say about that view of the commerce power.

But, with the exception of these and a few other restrictions, the entire domain of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the States, as above defined, lay within the constitutional and legislative power of the States, and without that of the Federal government. Was it the purpose of the fourteenth amendment, by the simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned, from the States to the Federal government?

Ummm.... good question, that!