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18 Pike’s heartland. That is not an auspicious start.

Matters do not improve from there. While Pike has traditionally served as another way to test for purposeful discrimination against out-of-state economic interests, and while some of our cases associated with that line have expressed special concern with certain state regulation of the instrumentalities of interstate transportation, see, petitioners would have us retool Pike for a much more ambitious project. They urge us to read Pike as authorizing judges to strike down duly enacted state laws regulating the in-state sale of ordinary consumer goods (like pork) based on nothing more than their own assessment of the relevant law’s “costs” and “benefits.”

That we can hardly do. Whatever other judicial authorities the Commerce Clause may imply, that kind of free-wheeling power is not among them. Petitioners point to nothing in the Constitution’s text or history that supports such a project. And our cases have expressly cautioned against judges using the dormant Commerce Clause as “a roving license for federal courts to decide what activities are appropriate for state and local government to undertake.” United Haulers, 550 U. S., at 343. While “[t]here was a time when this Court presumed to make such binding judgments for society, under the guise of interpreting the Due Process Clause,” we have long refused pleas like petitioners’ “to reclaim that ground” in the name of the dormant Commerce Clause. Id., at 347.

Not only is the task petitioners propose one the Commerce Clause does not authorize judges to undertake. This Court has also recognized that judges often are “not institutionally suited to draw reliable conclusions of the kind