A Circuit Split Gives SCOTUS an Opportunity To Overturn a Federal Law That Makes Home Distilling a Felony
Reason cited General Counsel Ondray Harris regarding 5th circuit decisions impacting private businesses.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which helped develop the arguments that prevailed in McNutt, notes that the implications of the decision extend far beyond home distilling. The 5th Circuit, CEI General Counsel Ondray Harris writes, addressed “a much broader question central to our constitutional structure of enumerated powers: whether Congress may use its taxing power to prohibit peaceful, private conduct inside the home. The court’s answer was no.”
That’s a big deal, Harris says, because the taxing power otherwise would be a license for wide-ranging interference with people’s habits and hobbies: “If Congress can prohibit an activity simply because it might complicate taxation, what can it not regulate? The government’s theory had no limiting principle. It would allow federal authority to extend into virtually any aspect of private life—particularly activities occurring in the home—so long as some connection to revenue could be asserted. The Constitution does not permit that kind of open-ended power.”