| Carter v. Carter Coal Co.
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63 Washington Law Rep. 986 affirmed in part and reversed in part. 12 F.Supp. 570 reversed. |
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| Syllabus
| Opinion
[ Sutherland ] | Separate
[ Hughes ] | CDInPart
[ Cardozo ] |
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Carter v. Carter Coal Co.
CERTIORARI TO THE CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
MR. JUSTICE CARDOZO (dissenting in Nos. 636, 649 and 650, and in No. 651 concurring in the result).
My conclusions, compendiously stated, are these:
(a) Part II of the statute sets up a valid system of price-fixing as applied to transactions in interstate commerce and to those in intrastate commerce where interstate commerce is directly or intimately affected. The prevailing opinion holds nothing to the contrary.
(b) Part II, with its system of price-fixing, is separable from Part III, which contains the provisions as to labor considered and condemned in the opinion of the court.
(c) Part II being valid, the complainants are under a duty to come in under the code, and are subject to a penalty if they persist in a refusal.
(d) The suits are premature insofar as they seek a judicial declaration as to the validity or invalidity of the regulations in respect of labor embodied in Part III. No opinion is expressed, either directly or by implication, as to those aspects of the case. It will be time enough to consider them when there is the threat, or even the possibility, of imminent enforcement. If that time shall arrive, protection will be given by clear provisions of the statute (§ 3) against any adverse inference flowing from delay or acquiescence.
(e) The suits are not premature to the extent that they are intended to avert a present wrong, though the wrong upon analysis will be found to be unreal.
The complainants are asking for a decree to restrain the enforcement of the statute in all or any of its provisions on the ground that it is a void enactment, and void in all its parts. If some of its parts are valid and are separable from others that are or may be void, and if the parts upheld and separated are sufficient to sustain a [p325] regulatory penalty, the injunction may not issue, and hence the suits must fail. There is no need when that conclusion has been reached to stir a step beyond. Of the provisions not considered, some may never take effect, at least in the absence of future happenings which are still uncertain and contingent. Some may operate in one way as to one group and in another way as to others, according to particular conditions as yet unknown and unknowable. A decision in advance as to the operation and validity of separable provisions in varying contingencies is premature, and hence unwise.
The court will not "anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it." Steamship Co. v. Emigration Commissioners, 113 U.S. 33, 39; Abrams v. Van Schaick, 293 U.S. 188; Wilshire Oil Co. v. United States, 295 U.S. 100. "It is not the habit of the Court to decide questions of a constitutional nature unless absolutely necessary to a decision of the case." Burton v. United States, 196 U.S. 283, 295.
Per Brandeis, J., in Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 346. The moment we perceive that there are valid and separable portions, broad enough to lay the basis for a regulatory penalty, inquiry should halt. The complainants must conform to whatever is upheld, and, as to parts excluded from the decision, especially if the parts are not presently effective, must make their protest in the future when the occasion or the need arises.
First: I am satisfied that the Act is within the power of the central government insofar as it provides for minimum and maximum prices upon sales of bituminous coal in the transactions of interstate commerce and in those of intrastate commerce where interstate commerce is directly or intimately affected. Whether it is valid also in other provisions that have been considered and condemned in the opinion of the court I do not find it necessary to determine at this time. Silence must not be taken as importing acquiescence. Much would have [p326] to be written if the subject, even as thus restricted, were to be explored through all its implications, historical and economic as well as strictly legal. The fact that the prevailing opinion leaves the price provisions open for consideration in the future makes it appropriate to forego a fullness of elaboration that might otherwise be necessary. As a system of price-fixing, the Act is challenged upon three grounds: (1) because the governance of prices is not within the commerce clause; (2) because it is a denial of due process forbidden by the Fifth Amendment, and (3) because the standards for administrative action are indefinite, with the result that there has been an unlawful delegation of legislative power.
(1) With reference to the first objection, the obvious and sufficient answer is, so far as the Act is directed to interstate transactions, that sales made in such conditions constitute interstate commerce, and do not merely "affect" it. Dahnke-Walker Milling Co. v. Bondurant, 257 U.S. 282, 290; Flanagan v. Federal Coal Co., 267 U.S. 222, 225; Lemke v. Farmers Crain Co., 258 U.S. 50, 60; Public Utilities Comm'n v. Attleboro Steam & Electric Co., 273 U.S. 83, 90; Federal Trade Comm'n v. Pacific States Paper Trade Assn., 273 U.S. 52, 64. To regulate the price for such transactions is to regulate commerce itself, and not alone its antecedent conditions or its ultimate consequences. The very act of sale is limited and governed. Prices in interstate transactions may not be regulated by the states. Baldwin v. Seelig, 294 U.S. 511. They must therefore be subject to the power of the nation unless they are to be withdrawn altogether from governmental supervision. Cf. Head Money Cases, 112 U.S. 580, 593; Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, § 1082. If such a vacuum were permitted, many a public evil incidental to interstate transactions would be left without a remedy. This does not mean, of course, that prices may be fixed for arbitrary reasons or in an arbitrary way. The commerce power of the nation is [p327] subject to the requirement of due process like the police power of the states. Hamilton v. Kentucky Distilleries Co., 251 U.S. 146, 156; cf. Brooks v. United States, 267 U.S. 432, 436, 437; Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502, 524. Heed must be given to similar considerations of social benefit or detriment in marking the division between reason and oppression. The evidence is overwhelming that Congress did not ignore those considerations in the adoption of this Act. What is to be said in that regard may conveniently be postponed to the part of the opinion dealing with the Fifth Amendment.
Regulation of prices being an exercise of the commerce power in respect of interstate transactions, the question remains whether it comes within that power as applied to intrastate sales where interstate prices are directly or intimately affected. Mining and agriculture and manufacture are not interstate commerce considered by themselves, yet their relation to that commerce may be such that, for the protection of the one, there is need to regulate the other. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 544, 545, 546. Sometimes it is said that the relation must be "direct" to bring that power into play. In many circumstances, such a description will be sufficiently precise to meet the needs of the occasion. But a great principle of constitutional law is not susceptible of comprehensive statement in an adjective. The underlying thought is merely this -- that "the law is not indifferent to considerations of degree." Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, supra, concurring opinion, p. 554. It cannot be indifferent to them without an expansion of the commerce clause that would absorb or imperil the reserved powers of the states. At times, as in the case cited, the waves of causation will have radiated so far that their undulatory motion, if discernible at all, will be too faint or obscure, too broken by cross-currents, to be heeded by the law. In such circumstances, [p328] the holding is not directed at prices or wages considered in the abstract, but at prices or wages in particular conditions. The relation may be tenuous, or the opposite, according to the facts. Always, the setting of the facts is to be viewed if one would know the closeness of the tie. Perhaps, if one group of adjectives is to be chosen in preference to another, "intimate" and "remote" will be found to be as good as any. At all events, "direct" and "indirect," even if accepted as sufficient, must not be read too narrowly. Cf. Stone, J., in Di Santo v. Pennsylvania., 273 U.S. 34, 44. A survey of the cases shows that the words have been interpreted with suppleness of adaptation and flexibility of meaning. The power is as broad as the need that evokes it.
One of the most common and typical instances of a relation characterized as direct has been that between interstate and intrastate rates for carriers by rail where the local rates are so low as to divert business unreasonably from interstate competitors. In such circumstances, Congress has the power to protect the business of its carriers against disintegrating encroachments. Shreveport Case, 234 U.S. 342, 351, 352; Wisconsin Railroad Comm'n v. Chicago, B. & Q. R. Co., 257 U.S. 563, 588; United States v. Louisiana, 290 U.S. 70, 75; Florida v. United States, 292 U.S. 1. To be sure, the relation even then may be characterized as indirect if one is nice or over-literal in the choice of words. Strictly speaking, the intrastate rates have a primary effect upon the intrastate traffic, and not upon any other, though the repercussions of the competitive system may lead to secondary consequences affecting interstate traffic also. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co. v. Florida, 295 U.S. 301, 306. What the cases really mean is that the causal relation in such circumstances is so close and intimate and obvious as to permit it to be called direct without subjecting the word to an unfair or excessive strain. There is a like immediacy [p329] here. Within rulings the most orthodox, the prices for intrastate sales of coal have so inescapable a relation to those for interstate sales that a system of regulation for transactions of the one class is necessary to give adequate protection to the system of regulation adopted for the other. The argument is strongly pressed by intervening counsel that this may not be true in all communities or in exceptional conditions. If so, the operators unlawfully affected may show that the Act, to that extent, is invalid as to them. Such partial invalidity is plainly an insufficient basis for a declaration that the Act is invalid as a whole. Dahnke-Walker Co. v. Bondurant, supra, p. 289; DuPont v. Commissioner, 289 U.S. 685, 688.
What has been said in this regard is said with added certitude when complainants' business is considered in the light of the statistics exhibited in the several records. In No. 636, the Carter case, the complainant has admitted that "substantially all" (over 97 1/2%) of the sales of the Carter Company are made in interstate commerce. In No. 649 the percentages of intrastate sales are, for one of the complaining companies, twenty-five percent, for another, one percent, and for most of the others, two percent or four. The Carter Company has its mines in West Virginia; the mines of the other companies are located in Kentucky. In each of those states, moreover, coal from other regions is purchased in large quantities, and is thus brought into competition with the coal locally produced. Plainly, it is impossible to say, either from the statute itself or from any figures laid before us, that interstate sales will not be prejudicially affected in West Virginia and Kentucky if intrastate prices are maintained on a lower level. If it be assumed for present purposes that there are other states or regions where the effect may be different, the complainants are not the champions of any rights except their own. Hatch v. [p330] Reardon, 204 U.S. 152, 160, 161; Premier-Pabst Sales Co. v. Grosscup, ante, p. 226.
(2) The commerce clause being accepted as a sufficient source of power, the next inquiry must be whether the power has been exercised consistently with the Fifth Amendment. In the pursuit of that inquiry, Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502, lays down the applicable principle. There, a statute of New York prescribing a minimum price for milk was upheld against the objection that price-fixing was forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. [n1] We found it a sufficient reason to uphold the challenged system that
the conditions or practices in an industry make unrestricted competition an inadequate safeguard of the consumer's interest, produce waste harmful to the public, threaten ultimately to cut off the supply of a commodity needed by the public, or portend the destruction of the industry itself.
291 U.S. at p. 538.
All this may be said, and with equal, if not greater force, of the conditions and practices in the bituminous coal industry, not only at the enactment of this statute in August, 1935, but for many years before. Overproduction was at a point where free competition had been degraded into anarchy. Prices had been cut so low that profit had become impossible for all except the lucky [p331] handful. Wages came down along with prices and with profits. There were strikes, at times nationwide in extent, at other times spreading over broad areas and many mines, with the accompaniment of violence and bloodshed and misery and bitter feeling. The sordid tale is unfolded in many a document and treatise. During the twenty-three years between 1913 and 1935, there were nineteen investigations or hearings by Congress or by specially created commissions with reference to conditions in the coal mines. [n2] The hope of betterment was faint unless the industry could be subjected to the compulsion of a code. In the weeks immediately preceding the passage of this Act, the country was threatened once more with a strike of ominous proportions. The plight of the industry was not merely a menace to owners and to mine workers; it was and had long been a menace to the public, deeply concerned in a steady and uniform supply of a fuel so vital to the national economy.
Congress was not condemned to inaction in the face of price wars and wage wars so pregnant with disaster. Commerce had been choked and burdened; its normal flow had been diverted from one state to another; there had been bankruptcy and waste and ruin alike for capital and for labor. The liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment does not include the right to persist in this anarchic riot.
When industry is grievously hurt, when producing concerns fail, when unemployment mounts and communities dependent upon profitable production are prostrated, the wells of commerce go dry.
Appalachian Coals, Inc. v. United States, 288 U.S. 344, 372. The free competition so often figured as a social good imports order and moderation and a decent regard for the welfare of the group. Cf. Sugar Institute, Inc. v. [p332] United States, 297 U.S. 553. There is testimony in these records, testimony even by the assailants of the statute, that only through a system of regulated prices can the industry be stabilized and set upon the road of orderly and peaceful progress. [n3] If further facts are looked for, they are narrated in the findings, as well as in congressional reports and a mass of public records. [n4] After making every allowance for difference of opinion as to the most efficient cure, the student of the subject is confronted with the indisputable truth that there were ills to be corrected, and ills that had a direct relation to the maintenance of commerce among the states without friction or diversion. An evil existing, and also the power to correct it, the lawmakers were at liberty to use their own discretion in the selection of the means. [n5]
(3) Finally, and in answer to the third objection to the statute in its price-fixing provisions, there has been no excessive delegation of legislative power. The prices [p333] to be fixed by the District Boards and the Commission must conform to the following standards: they must be just and equitable; they must take account of the weighted average cost of production for each minimum price area; they must not be unduly prejudicial or preferential as between districts or as between producers within a district, and they must reflect as nearly as possible the relative market value of the various kinds, qualities and sizes of coal, at points of delivery in each common consuming market area; to the end of affording the producers in the several districts substantially the same opportunity to dispose of their coals on a competitive basis as has heretofore existed. The minimum for any district shall yield a return, per net ton, not less than the weighted average of the total costs per net ton of the tonnage of the minimum price area; the maximum for any mine, if a maximum is fixed, shall yield a return not less than cost plus a reasonable profit. Reasonable prices can as easily be ascertained for coal as for the carriage of passengers or property under the Interstate Commerce Act, or for the services of brokers in the stockyards (Tagg Bros. & Moorhead v. United States, 280 U.S. 420), or for the use of dwellings under the Emergency Rent Laws (Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135, 157; Marcus Brown Co. v. Feldman, 256 U.S. 170; Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel, 258 U.S. 242), adopted at a time of excessive scarcity, when the laws of supply and demand no longer gave a measure for the ascertainment of the reasonable. The standards established by this Act are quite as definite as others that have had the approval of this court. New York Central Securities Corp. v. United States, 287 U.S. 12, 24; Federal Radio Comm'n v. Nelson Bros. Bond & Mortgage Co., 289 U.S. 266, 286; Tagg Bros. & Moorhead v. United States, supra; Mabler v. Eby, 264 U.S. 32. Certainly a bench of judges, not experts in the coal business, cannot [p334] say with assurance that members of a commission will be unable, when advised and informed by others experienced in the industry, to make the standards workable, or to overcome, through the development of an administrative technique, many obstacles and difficulties that might be baffling or confusing to inexperience or ignorance.
The price provisions of the Act are contained in a chapter known as Part II. The final subdivisions of that part enumerate certain forms of conduct which are denounced as "unfair methods of competition." For the most part, the prohibitions are ancillary to the fixing of a minimum price. The power to fix a price carries with it the subsidiary power to forbid and prevent evasion. Cf. United States v. Ferger, 250 U.S. 199. The few prohibitions that may be viewed as separate are directed to situations that may never be realized in practice. None of the complainants threatens or expresses the desire to do these forbidden acts. As to those phases of the statute, the suits are premature.
Second: the next inquiry must be whether Part I of the statute, which creates the administrative agencies, and Part II, which has to do in the main with the price-fixing machinery as well as preliminary sections levying a tax or penalty, are separable from Part III, which deals with labor relations in the industry, with the result that what is earlier would stand if what is later were to fall.
The statute prescribes the rule by which construction shall be governed.
If any provision of this Act, or the application thereof to any person or circumstances, is held invalid, the remainder of the Act and the application of such provisions to other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.
§ 15. The rule is not read as an inexorable mandate. Dorchy v. Kansas, 264 U.S. 286, 290; Utah Power & Light Co. v. Pfost, 286 [p335] U.S. 165, 184; Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton R. Co., 295 U.S. 330, 362. It creates a "presumption of divisibility," which is not applied mechanically or in a manner to frustrate the intention of the lawmakers. Even so, the burden is on the litigant who would escape its operation. Here, the probabilities of intention are far from overcoming the force of the presumption. They fortify and confirm it. A confirmatory token is the formal division of the statute into "Parts" separately numbered. Part III which deals with labor, is physically separate from everything that goes before it. But, more convincing than the evidences of form and structure, the division into chapters and sections and paragraphs, each with its proper subject matter, are the evidences of plan and function. Part II, which deals with prices, is to take effect at once, or as soon as the administrative agencies have finished their administrative work. Part III, in some of its most significant provisions, the section or subdivision in respect of wages and the hours of labor, may never take effect at all. This is clear beyond the need for argument from the mere reading of the statute. The maximum hours of labor may be fixed by agreement between the producers of more than two thirds of the annual national tonnage production for the preceding calendar year and the representatives of more than one half the mine workers. Wages may be fixed by agreement or agreements negotiated by collective bargaining in any district or group of two or more districts between representatives of producers of more than two thirds of the annual tonnage production of such districts or each of such districts in a contracting group during the preceding calendar year, and representatives of the majority of the mine workers therein. It is possible that none of these agreements as to hours and wages will ever be made. If made, they may not be completed for months, or even years. In the meantime, however, the provisions [p336] of Part II will be continuously operative, and will determine prices in the industry. Plainly, then, there was no intention on the part of the framers of the statute that prices should not be fixed if the provisions for wages or hours of labor were found to be invalid.
Undoubtedly the rules as to labor relations are important provisions of the statute. Undoubtedly the lawmakers were anxious that provisions so important should have the force of law. But they announced with all the directness possible for words that they would keep what they could have if they could not have the whole. Stabilizing prices would go a long way toward stabilizing labor relations by giving the producers capacity to pay a living wage. [n6] To hold otherwise is to ignore the whole history of mining. All in vain have official committees [p337] inquired and reported in thousands of printed pages if this lesson has been lost. In the face of that history, the court is now holding that Congress would have been unwilling to give the force of law to the provisions of Part II, which were to take effect at once, if it could not have Part III, which, in the absence of agreement between the employers and the miners, would never take effect at all. Indeed, the prevailing opinion goes so far, it seems, as to insist that if the least provision of the statute in any of the three chapters is to be set aside as void, the whole statute must go down for the reason that everything, from end to end, or everything, at all events, beginning with § 4, is part of the Bituminous Coal Code, to be swallowed at a single draught, without power in the commission, or even in the court, to abate a jot or tittle. One can only wonder what is left of the "presumption of divisibility" which the lawmakers were at pains to establish later on. Codes under the National Recovery Act are not a genuine analogy. The Recovery Act made it mandatory (§ 7a) that every code should contain provisions as to labor, including wages and hours, and left everything else to the discretion of the codifiers. Wages and hours in such circumstances were properly described as "essential features of the plan, its very bone and sinew" (Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, supra, concurring opinion, p. 555), which, taken from the body of a code, would cause it to collapse. Here, on the face of the statute, the price provisions of one Part and the labor provisions of the other (the two to be administered by separate agencies) are made of equal rank.
What is true of the sections and subdivisions that deal with wages and the hours of labor is true also of the other provisions of the same chapter of the Act. Employees are to have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, [p338] and shall be free from interference, restraint or coercion of employers, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives, or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and no employee and no one seeking employment shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union. No threat has been made by anyone to do violence to the enjoyment of these immunities and privileges. No attempt to violate them may be made by the complainants, or indeed by anyone else in the term of four years during which the Act is to remain in force. By another subdivision, employees are to have the right of peaceable assemblage for the discussion of the principles of collective bargaining, shall be entitled to select their own checkweighman to inspect the weighing or measuring of coal, and shall not be required, as a condition of employment, to live in company houses or to trade at the store of the employer. None of these privileges or immunities has been threatened with impairment. No attempt to impair them may ever be made by anyone.
Analysis of the statute thus leads to the conclusion that the provisions of Part III, so far as summarized, are separable from Parts I and II, and that any declaration in respect of their validity or invalidity under the commerce clause of the Constitution or under any other section will anticipate a controversy that may never become real. This being so, the proper course is to withhold an expression of opinion until expression becomes necessary. A different situation would be here if a portion of the statute, and a portion sufficient to uphold the regulatory penalty, did not appear to be valid. If the whole statute were a nullity, the complainants would be at liberty to stay the hand of the tax gatherer threatening to collect the penalty, for collection in such circumstances would be a trespass, an illegal and forbidden act. Child Labor [p339] Tax Case, 259 U.S. 20; Hill v. Wallace, 259 U.S. 44, 62; Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197, 215; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 536. It would be no answer to say that the complainants might avert the penalty by declaring themselves code members ( § 3) and fighting the statute afterwards. In the circumstances supposed, there would be no power in the national government to put that constraint upon them. The Act by hypothesis, being void in all its parts as a regulatory measure, the complainants might stand their ground, refuse to sign anything, and resist the onslaught of the collector as the aggression of a trespasser. But the case, as it comes to us, assumes a different posture, a posture inconsistent with the commission of a trespass, either present or prospective. The hypothesis of complete invalidity has been shown to be unreal. The price provisions being valid, the complainants were under a duty to come in under the code whether the provisions as to labor are valid or invalid, and their failure to come in has exposed them to a penalty lawfully imposed. They are thus in no position to restrain the acts of the collector, or to procure a judgment defeating the operation of the statute, whatever may be the fate hereafter of particular provisions not presently enforceable. The right to an injunction failing, the suits must be dismissed. Nothing more is needful -- no pronouncement more elaborate -- for a disposition of the controversy.
A last assault upon the statute is still to be repulsed. The complainants take the ground that the Act may not coerce them through the imposition of a penalty into a seeming recognition or acceptance of the code, if any of the code provisions are invalid, however separable from others. I cannot yield assent to a position so extreme. It is one thing to impose a penalty for refusing to come in under a code that is void altogether. It is a very different thing if a penalty is imposed for [p340] refusing to come in under a code invalid at the utmost in separable provisions, not immediated operative, the right to contest them being explicitly reserved. The penalty in those circumstances is adopted as a lawful sanction to compel submission to a statute having the quality of law. A sanction of that type is the one in controversy here. So far as the provisions for collective bargaining and freedom from coercion are concerned, the same duties are imposed upon employers by § 9 of the statute whether they come in under the code or not. So far as code members are subject to regulation as to wages and hours of labor, the force of the complainants' argument is destroyed when reference is made to those provisions of the statute in which the effect of recognition and acceptance is explained and limited. By § 3 of the Act,
No producer shall by reason of his acceptance of the code provided for in section 4 or of the drawback of taxes provided for in section 3 of this Act be held to be precluded or estopped from contesting the constitutionality of any provision of said code, or its validity as applicable to said producer.
These provisions are reinforced and made more definite by §§ 5(c) and 6(b), which, so far as presently material, are quoted in the margin. [n7] For the subscriber to the code who is [p341] doubtful as to the validity of some of its requirements, there is thus complete protection. If this might otherwise be uncertain, it would be made clear by our decision in Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123, which was applied in the court below at the instance and for the benefit of one of these complainants to give relief against penalties accruing during suit. Helvering v. Carter, No. 651. Finally, the adequacy of the remedial devices is made even more apparent when one remembers that the attack upon the statute in its labor regulations assumes the existence of a controversy that may never become actual. The failure to agree upon a wage scale or upon maximum hours of daily or weekly labor may make the statutory scheme abortive in the very phases and aspects that the court has chosen to condemn. What the code will provide as to wages and hours of labor, or whether it will provide anything, is still in the domain of prophecy. The opinion of the court begins at the wrong end. To adopt a homely form of words, the complainants have been crying before they are really hurt.
My vote is for affirmance.
I am authorized to state that MR. JUSTICE BRANDEIS and MR. JUSTICE STONE join in this opinion.
1. Hamilton v. Kentucky Distilleries Co., 251 U.S. 146, 156:
The war power of the United States, like its other powers and like the police power of the States, is subject to applicable constitutional limitations (Ex parte Milligan, 4 Wall. 2, 121-127; Monongahela Navigation Co. v. United States, 148 U.S. 312, 336; United States v. Joint Traffic Assn., 171 U.S. 505, 571; McCray v. United States, 195 U.S. 27, 61; United States v. Cress, 243 U.S. 316, 326); but the Fifth Amendment imposes in this respect no greater limitation upon the national power than does the Fourteenth Amendment upon state power. In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436, 448; Carroll v. Greenwich Ins. Co., 199 U.S. 401, 410.
Cf. Brooks v. United States, 267 U.S. 432, 436, 437; Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502, 524.
2. The dates and titles are given in the brief for the Government in No. 636, at pp. 118.
3. See also the Report of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the National Coal Association, October 26-27, 1934, and the statement of the resolutions adopted at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting as reported at hearings preliminary to the passage of this Act. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, 1st Session, on H.R. 8479, pp. 20, 152.
4. There is significance in the many bills proposed to the Congress after painstaking reports during successive national administrations with a view to the regulation of the coal industry by Congressional action. S. 2557, October 4, 1921, 67th Cong., 1st Sess.; S. 3147, February 13, 1922, 67th Cong., 2nd Sess.; H.R. 9222, February 11, 1926, 69th Cong., 1st Sess.; H.R. 11898, May 4, 1926 (S. 4177), 69th Cong., 1st Sess.; S. 2935, January 7, 1932 (H.R. 7536), 72nd Cong., 1st Sess.; also, same session, H.R. 12916 and 9924.
Price control, like any other form of discrimination, is unconstitutional only if arbitrary, discriminatory or demonstrably irrelevant to the policy the legislature is free to adopt, and hence an unnecessary and unwarranted interference with individual liberty.
Nebbia v. New York, supra, at p. 538.
6. At a hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, First Session, on H.R. 8479, counsel for the United Mine Workers of America, who had cooperated in the drafting of the Act, said (p. 35):
We have, as can be well understood, a provision of this code dealing with labor relations at the mines. We think that is justified; we think it is impossible to conceive of any regulation of this industry that does not provide for regulation of labor relations at the mines. I realize that, while it may be contested, yet I feel that it is going to be sustained.
Also, there is a provision in this act that if this act, or any part of it, is declared to be invalid as affecting any person or persons, the rest of it will be valid, and if the other provisions of this act still stand and the labor provisions are struck down, we still want the act, because it stabilizes the industry and enables us to negotiate with them on a basis which will at least be different from what we have been confronted with since April, and that is a disinclination to even negotiate a labor wage scale because they claim they are losing money.
If the labor provisions go down, we still want the industry stabilized, so that our union may negotiate with them on the basis of a living American wage standard.
7. § 5(c).
Any producer whose membership in the code and whose right to a drawback on the taxes as provided under this Act has been canceled shall have the right to have his membership restored upon payment by him of all taxes in full for the time during which it shall be found by the Commission that his violation of the code or of any regulation thereunder, the observance of which is required by its terms, shall have continued. In making its findings under this subsection the Commission shall state specifically (1) the period of time during which such violation continued, and (2) the amount of taxes required to be paid to bring about reinstatement as a code member.
§ 6(b).
Any person aggrieved by an order issued by the Commission or Labor Board in a proceeding to which such person is a party may obtain a review of such order in the Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States, within any circuit wherein such person resides or has his principal place of business, or in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, by filing in such court, within sixty days after the entry of such order, a written petition praying that the order of the Commission or Labor Board be modified or set aside in whole or in part. . . . The judgment and decree of the court, affirming, modifying, and enforcing or setting aside, in whole or in part, any such order of the Commission or Labor Board, as the case may be, shall be final, subject to review by the Supreme Court of the United States upon certiorari or certification as provided in sections 239 and 240 of the Judicial Code, as amended (U.S.C. title 28, §§ 346 and 347.)