Court Opinion

ID: 9428833
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:24:56.099642+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:15.493256
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
with whom Justice Blackmun joins, dissenting.
Appellee Grace Brethren Church filed suit against the United States Secretary of Labor and other defendants in the United States District Court for the Central District of California claiming that the Federal Unemployment Tax Act violates the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution. The District Court held the Act unconstitutional. Pursuant to a federal statute providing for expedited review in cases of this kind,1 the defendants appealed directly to this Court, by*420passing the Court of Appeals precisely as Congress intended. Recognizing the need for prompt review of a constitutional question affecting the nationwide operation of a federal statute, the Court holds that this special jurisdiction was properly invoked. It then reaches the curious conclusion that, because some of the defendants are California taxing authorities that administer this cooperative federal-state program in that State, Congress intended that only state courts could pass on the constitutional validity of this federal statute.2 Neither the language nor the legislative history of the Tax Injunction Act requires such a strange result.
The Tax Injunction Act provides that, federal district courts “shall not enjoin, suspend, or restrain” the activities of state taxing authorities. The preclusion of federal injunctive relief was a response to a specific problem that concerned Congress in 1937. In the States in which taxpayers were required to challenge a tax assessment in a refund suit, only taxpayers that could sue state taxing authorities in federal court could obtain injunctive relief. The privileged taxpayers were primarily the foreign corporations that could invoke federal diversity jurisdiction. These federal suits were objectionable not only because of this discrimination but also because state treasuries often were deprived of tax revenues while the federal suits were adjudicated and because the federal suits involved only state-law questions that were more appropriate for state-court resolution. See S. Rep. No. 1035, 75th Cong., 1st Sess., 1-2 (1937); 81 Cong. Rec. 1416-1417 (1937) (Sen. Bone); see also Rosewell v. LaSalle *421National Bank, 450 U. S. 503, 533 (Stevens, J., dissenting).
A literal reading of the Tax Injunction Act manifestly does not preclude the declaratory judgment entered in this litigation. Nor do the concerns that gave rise to its enactment require such a bar. Appellees’ challenge is based on the Federal Constitution and is directed at a federal-state program administered according to federal requirements. Only federal questions are involved.
In Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. v. Huffman, 319 U. S. 293, the Court recognized that equitable considerations can in some cases provide adequate justification for federal courts to withhold declaratory relief when the Tax Injunction Act precluded injunctive relief. In the intervening 40 years, this equitable doctrine has been sufficient to protect state tax laws from unnecessary federal interference. Today, however, the Court confronts a situation in which the challenge to a state tax does not implicate these concerns.3 Ironically, the absence in these unusual cases of the traditional justification for a ban on declaratory relief seems to spur the Court to revise the Tax Injunction Act to preclude declaratory as well as injunctive relief. To accomplish this revision, the Court must ignore the plain meaning of the statute and the limited concerns that gave rise to its enactment. The Court instead relies upon the legislative history of the Johnson Act, ch. 283, 48 Stat. 775, see ante, at 409-410, n. 22, even though that statute was enacted before the Declaratory Judgment Act, ch. 512, 48 Stat. 955. Even if that suspect analysis could be overlooked, the fact remains that, after the Declaratory Judgment Act was on the books for three years, Congress did not see fit to bar declaratory relief when it expressly precluded injunctive relief in the Tax Injunction Act. The avoidance of *422a decision on the merits in this litigation hardly seems worth the Court’s nimble exercise in lawmaking.4
The Court has both the power and the duty to decide the merits. I therefore respectfully dissent.

 Title 28 U. S. C. § 1252 provides:
“Any party may appeal to the Supreme Court from an interlocutory or final judgment, decree or order of any court of the United States . . . hold*420ing an Act of Congress unconstitutional in any civil action, suit, or proceeding to which the United States or any of its agencies, or any officer or employee thereof, as such officer or employee, is a party.”

 A further irony is that the Secretary of Labor, who is certainly the principal defendant even if not an indispensable party, could remove such an action if it were filed in state court. Indeed, with respect to one of the actions consolidated in the District Court, the Secretary did just that.

 Indeed, to the extent that equitable considerations are implicated they favor the procedure followed in these cases whereby expedited review in this Court is available.

 There is an independent reason why the Tax Injunction Act does not preclude federal declaratory relief in this litigation. When one compares the layers of review that must be exhausted in the California system with the direct appeal to this Court provided by 28 U. S. C. § 1252, one surely cannot conclude that the state system provides the “plain, speedy and efficient” remedy that Congress intended for the resolution of the federal questions these cases present.