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You said:
"The Violence Against Women Act is ruled unconstitutional because there is no locus that puts some guy smacking his girlfriend or wife around into the realm of interstate commerce"
I haven't read the opinion -- but I can't imagine this was the basis for the decision. The Civil Rights Cases, which the original post mentioned, limited the applicability of section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to cases involving "state action" -- it limited Congress' ability to pass civil rights legislation only where there was some government involvement. The problem became identifying state action. A simple example -- if a state passed a law legalizing "whites only" restaurants and subjecting blacks attempting to use them to arrest, Congress was authorized to pass a law declaring that blacks could not be arrested attempting to use a restaurant. On the other hand, if an individual restaurant owner simply refused to serve blacks, and a black man came and sat down at a table, he could summon the police (a government entity) and have that man arrested. To get around problems like these, the Federal government began to use the Commerce Clause as a separate justification for civil rights laws that appeared to reach individual conduct. Simultaneously, a more liberal Supreme Court began to expand what was considered "state action" to the point where it became fairly easy to establish. Again, I haven't read the opinion, but if this Act has been struck down under the Civil Rights Cases, the justification was probably that there was insufficient "state action" to support the statute, and not that it didn't involve interstate commerce.
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