Roscoe Filburn, Criminal Wheat Farmer

The United States Supreme Court, possibly this week, will hand down a decision which will impact every American. A case that is already being mentioned in conjunction with the Obama Care Case is Wickard v. Filburn, a Supreme Court cased decided in 1942 involving a wheat farmer named Filburn from Ohio.

Wickard v. Filburn is of critical importance to the Obama Care litigation, and it involves a small wheat farmer who challenged the United States Department of Agriculture because the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938 set quotas on wheat put into interstate commerce and set penalties for overproduction.

Mr. Filburn won in the lower courts but had his victory snatched away by the United States Supreme Court in 1942. His case paved the way for an expansive view of the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.

The Supreme Court  held that Mr. Filburn's growing of wheat in Ohio even though local in nature, and did not involve a commercial transaction, Congress still had the power to regulate his activity because Filburn's growing of wheat had a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

It is indeed curious this wheat farmer in Ohio would be at the center of one of the most controversial cases ever to come before the United States Supreme Court.

The Story

Roscoe Filburn owned and operated a small farm in Montgomery County, Ohio. He maintained a herd of dairy cattle, sold milk, raised poultry and sold eggs, and grew winter wheat. He fed part of the wheat harvest to his poultry and livestock, sold some of the wheat in the open market and used some of the wheat for making flour for his family.

In July, 1940, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 established that Mr. Filburn could plant 11.1 acres of which he could produce a yield of 20 bushels per acre. He was given notice of this 11 acre allotment in July, 1940. Mr. Filburn, instead planted 23 acres in violation of his allotment.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 had a goal of controlling the volume of wheat moving in interstate and foreign commerce in order to avoid surpluses and shortages. The Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Wickard, had the power to determine a national acreage allotment for wheat. The wheat allotment was then apportioned to states and then the counties eventually gave individual acreage allotments to individual farmers.  In essence, the 1938 Act was a sanctioned cartel which helped raise prices for wheat farmers.

Mr. Filburn did not want to sell all of his wheat but wanted to use it for feed for livestock and for his own personal use.

Article I, section 8, clause 3 of the United States Constitution empowers Congress to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with Indian tribes." It is this constitutional power that Mr. Filburn ran into. He did not want to sell all of his wheat ,but the Supreme Court held that even if Filburn's activities were local and did not involve a commercial transaction, Congress could still regulate Filburn's activities because they had a "substantial effect" on interstate commerce!

Filburn filed his initial complaint against the Secretary of Agriculture of the United States, 3 members of the Montgomery County Agricultural Conservation Committee, and a member of the State Agricultural Conservation Committee for Ohio. He sought to exempt himself from enforcement of a marketing order imposed by the Adjustment Act of 1938. He thought the Act was unconstitutional and not sustainable under the Commerce Clause. The lower court agreed with Filburn.

The Supreme Court disagreed and claimed "The wheat industry has been a problem industry for some years...the decline in the export trade has left a large surplus in production which in connection with an abnormally large supply of wheat…in recent years, cause congestion in a number of markets; tied up railroad cars, and caused elevators…to turn away grains,…"

The Supreme Court claimed that Mr. Filburn's excess contribution of wheat "…may be trivial by itself is not enough to remove him from the scope of federal regulation where, as here, his contribution, taken together with that of many others similarly situated is far from trivial."

So, the Supreme Court in 1942 claimed that Congress has "…the power to regulate commerce includes the power to regulate the prices at which commodities in that commerce are dealt in and practices affecting such prices."

Some legal scholars claim the agricultural case of Wickard v. Filburn is one of the most "pernicious decisions" the Supreme Court of the United States has ever made. If  Wickard v. Filburn controls then Congress can regulate anything.

A wheat farmer in Ohio attempting to limit the power of the federal government may have laid the groundwork for the government's argument in the Obama care case that there is no limiting principle in which to confine Congress' enumerated commerce power.