Posted on 03/21/2021 4:15:47 AM PDT by RandFan
Republicans are aiming to stir up a legal battle over Biden's pandemic relief bill, targeting a provision in the American Rescue Plan they say is an unconstitutional infringement on states' ability to devise their own tax policies.
A provision in the bill that forbids states from using billions in aid to offset any tax cuts they might implement has sparked a backlash from Republican lawmakers and state attorneys general. Their criticisms could lay the groundwork for a court battle over states' rights and government overreach akin to the Supreme Court case over the fate of ObamaCare.
This time, the GOP appears to be framing the issue as the Biden administration getting in the way of state and local leaders cutting taxes for their own residents.
On Tuesday, a group of 21 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the Treasury Department threatening legal action if the administration intends to prevent states from cutting taxes.
"This language could be read to deny States the ability to cut taxes in any manner whatsoever – even if they would have provided such tax relief with or without the prospect of COVID-19 relief funds," the letter reads.
"Absent a more sensible interpretation from your department, this provision would amount to an unprecedented and unconstitutional intrusion on the separate sovereignty of the State through federal usurpation of essentially one half of the State's fiscal ledgers. Indeed, such federal usurpation of state tax policy would represent the greatest attempted invasion of state sovereignty by Congress in the history of our Republic," they wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Ping
If states were serious, at the same time they’re picking a fight over this, they’d be ensuring the integrity of future elections.
They’re not.
Talk is cheap.
Many state legislatures are trying to address the issue of “integrity of future elections”. Legislation isn’t accomplished in a day.
Name a state that’s gotten rid of those damn Dominion voting machines, repealed RCV, come out against HR1.
It’s been months since November.
They’ve had more than a day, haven’t they...
Federal funds always come with strings attached. Don't want the strings? Then don't accept the money.
More GOP hot air. They’re not doing anything.
Just do what dems do. Take the money, and do whatever the heck you want with tax policy. Make the fess assert power and go through the courts.
It’s much harder to claw money back than it is to give it away.
The states have never expressly constitutional given the unconstitutionally big federal government the specific power to tell the sovereign states how to manage their respective tax revenues.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
Regarding state revenues, misguided state lawmakers are as much of a problem as corrupt federal senators are imo, state lawmakers seemingly clueless to continual federal government overreach of its constitutionally limited powers thanks to their respective, post-17th Amendment ratification crook senators.
More specifically, constitutionally low-information citizens are continually electing state lawmakers and federal senators who evidently don’t know the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers any better than the citizens who elect them do.
For example, patriots need to get their state lawmakers up to speed with the fed’s limited power to appropriate taxes as clarified by previous generations of state sovereignty-respecting Supreme Court justices.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Consider that most of the vote-buying funding that the “bleeding heart,” desperate Democratic and RINO-controlled Congress is now providing through deliberately misnamed COVID-19 relief is actually based on stolen state revenues which should never have left the states in the first place.
In other words, so-called “federal” COVID-19 relief is actually state revenues stolen by Congress by means of unconstitutional taxes according to the Gibbons v. Ogden excerpt above, taxes that corrupt Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers. (Congress’s Section 8-limited powers are not to be confused with unconstitutional (imo) federal HUD Section 8 housing regulations.)
The bottom line is that the Founding States had intended for the states, not the feds, to take care of the people.
In fact, the congressional record shows that Rep. John Bingham, a constitutional lawmaker, had clarified that the states had left the care of the people to the states, not the feds.
”[…] the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Federal Constitution, is in the States, and not in the Federal Government [emphases added].” —Rep. John Bingham, Congressional Globe, 1866. (See about middle of 3rd column.)
Justice Brandeis later reflected on Bingham’s words by introducing his “laboratories of democracy” metaphor to describe the relationship between the states and their citizens intended by the founders.
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose [emphasis added], serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” —Justice Brandeis, Laboratories of democracy.
So the problem remains that, until patriots get their “asleep at the wheel” state lawmakers up to speed on the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers so that the sovereign states can work together to put a stop to federal government overreach if its constitutionally limited powers, the feds will continue to be an unconstitutional middleman “helping” the states to “manage” their revenues.
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