For two reasons, we believe that
Lopez does not call on us to hold that FACE is beyond Congress's power to regulate activity that substantially affects interstate commerce. First, unlike the Gun–Free School Zones Act, FACE prohibits interference with a commercial activity—the provision and receipt of reproductive-health services.
Cf. id. at ––––, 115 S.Ct. at 1633 (education is not a commercial activity). FACE does not require us to “pile inference upon inference” to conclude that the conduct that it proscribes affects interstate commerce. As the House and Senate committee reports show, the causal link is quite direct—when people interfere with a business, the availability of the service provided by that business declines. Second, in
Lopez, the Supreme Court did not overturn
Katzenbach v. McClung, Wickard v. Filburn, or any other opinion holding that Congress has the power to regulate conduct that reduces interstate commerce in a good or service. See
Lopez, 514 U.S. at ––––, 115 S.Ct. at 1637 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (
Katzenbach, Wickard, and other post-New Deal cases “are within the fair ambit of the Court's practical conception of commercial regulation and are not called into question by our decision today”). Therefore,
Lopez notwithstanding, FACE is a valid exercise of Congress's power to regulate activity that substantially affects interstate commerce.