Court Opinion

ID: 9419510
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:49:51.579761+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:18.678143
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Jackson,
dissenting:
This decision authorizes in my opinion an unwarranted extension of the power of a state to subject persons to its taxing power who' are not within its jurisdiction and have not in any manner submitted themselves to it. The General Trading Company is, in the language of the opinion, made “the tax collector for the State.” We have heretofore held, and I think properly, that the state may make tax collectors of those who come in and do business within its jurisdiction, for thereby they submit themselves to its power. Such was the situation in both Monamotor Oil Co. v. Johnson, 292 U. S. 86, and Felt & Tarrant Mfg. Co. v. Gallagher, 306 U. S. 62. These are the only authorities cited by the Court on this point, and they clearly are not precedents to support this decision.
In this case, as the opinion points out, the General Trading Company never qualified in Iowa and has no office, branch, warehouse, or general agent in the State. From Minnesota it ships goods ordered from salesmen by purchasers in Iowa. Orders are accepted only in Minnesota. The transaction of sale is not taxed and, being clearly interstate commerce, is not taxable. McLeod v. Dilworth Co., ante, p. 327. So we are holding that a state has power to make a tax collector of one whom it has no power to tax. Certainly no state has a constitutional warrant for making a tax collector of one as the price of the privilege of doing interstate commerce. He does not get the right from the state, and the state cannot qualify it. I can imagine no principle of states’ rights or state comity which can justify what is done here. *340Nor does the practice seem conducive to good order in the federal system. The power of Iowa to enforce collection in other states is certainly very limited and the effort to do so on any wide scale is unlikely either to be systematically pursued or successfully executed.
I recognize the pressure to uphold all manner of efforts to collect tax moneys. But this decision, by which one may not ship goods from anywhere in the United States to a purchaser in Iowa without becoming a nonresident tax collector, exceeds everything so far done by this Court. In my opinion the statute is an effort to exert extraterritorial control beyond any which a state could exert if there were no Constitution at all. I can think of nothing in or out of the Constitution which warrants this effort to reach beyond the State’s o^wn border to make out-of-state merchants tax collectors because they engage in interstate commerce with the State’s citizens.
Mr. Justice Roberts joins in this opinion.