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Even though this court has done more than any other in the last 60 years to curtail the Congress's gross misuse of the interstate commerce clause, it hasn't actually done much to rationalize it.
So I'm not surprised that when the liberal tool (using the insterstate clause to limit states rights, notice that all the liberal justices are in on the majority opinion) aligns with a conservative social issue (zero tolerance for certain drugs) that a couple of the federalist justices could be swayed.
I'm surprised that it was Scalia and not O'Connor that flipped, but the ruling itself isn't a surprise.
And if you really want to cast blame for this decision, it all goes back to FDR and his big government policies. During the Depression the Department of Agriculture set limits on various crop sizes. One farmer grew more corn than the limit. The entire excess crop was for his own personal consumption and was never put on the market, local or interstate.
The Supreme Court upheld the fine against him on the grounds that the Congress had the authority to regulate interstate commerce and that this qualified not because it was directly interstate commerce but because it could have secondary effects on interstate commerce (since he grew his own corn, he would not buy corn at the supermarket, therefore affecting the interstate marketplace).
For the next 40 years the Congress had pretty much free reign to regulate whatever it wanted, because a secondary commerce affect could always be found.
This changed a bit in 1996 when the Court finally found an issue on which it was not willing to allow the interstate commerce claim. A 1990 federal gun law tried to make it a federal crime to possess firearms within 1,000 feet of a public school and used interstate commerce justifications to claim jurisdiction.
It is because of this case that court watchers thought this court would side with the states on medical marijuana, but I view it as more of an anomoly than a precedent.
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