Court Opinion

ID: 9489430
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:15:40.901305+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:31.778474
License: Public Domain

SENTELLE, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join without reservation in the holding of the court. I write separately only to place a little distance between myself and what I deem to be an overstated dictum. After describing a hypothetical tax, the majority states that with the majority’s proposed variations “the Kansas tax would, in our view, be sufficiently like a tax ‘imposed on the production of natural gas’ to be recoverable under § 110.” Maj. op. at 1485. As no such tax is before us, for us to authoritatively render an opinion on what it would be constitutes nothing less than the advisory opinion that Article III courts have held ourselves unable to render since the earliest days of constitutional jurisprudence. See, e.g., Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83, 96, 88 S.Ct. 1942, 1950, 20 L.Ed.2d 947 (1968) (“[T]he oldest and most consistent thread in the federal law of justici-ability is that the federal courts will not give advisory opinions.” (Internal quotations and citations omitted)); WRIGHT, MilleR & Cooper, 13 Federal Praotioe AND Prooedure § 3529.1 (1984) (detailing the long history of the rule forbidding advisory opinions). We have already, in my view, crossed the line of appropriate Article III jurisprudence in dealing with § 110 tax treatment when the prior panel stated “[i]f a state sought to capitalize the annual production (or revenue) enjoyed by each producer by multiplying it by a single fixed figure, the [property] tax would plainly be similar enough to a production tax to qualify under § 110.” Colorado Interstate Gas Co. v. FERC, 850 F.2d 769, 772 (D.C.Cir.1988). I think it time we quit advising state legislatures on how to draft their tax statutes and confined ourselves to construing the statutes actually before us.