Court Opinion

ID: 9426306
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:30.945507+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:00.148096
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
with whom Mr. Justice Rehnquist joins, dissenting.
I would have thought that when the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, on December 21, 1973, provided respondent Samuel Shapiro with supplements to the responses to the interrogatories, at that time, if not before, he surely satisfied and met all that was required to bring the Anti-Injunction Act, 26 U. S. C. § 7421 (a), and the principle of Enochs v. Williams Packing Co., 370 U. S. 1 (1962), into full and effective application. It would follow that the District Court’s dismissal of the complaint at that point was entirely proper and should have been affirmed.
Given, however, the result the Court very recently reached in Laing v. United States, 423 U. S. 161 (1976), the decision today, shored up by what seem to me to be *635the inapposite cases cited, ante, at 629-630, n. 11, is not unexpected. I am far from certain that the Court is correct, and I am confused by the Court’s failure even to cite Bob Jones University v. Simon, 416 U. S. 725 (1974), and Commissioner v. “Americans United,” Inc., 416 U. S. 752 (1974), two cases heavily relied upon by the Commissioner here and, I think, of some significance. I observe only that, with Laing and the present decision, the Court now has traveled a long way down the road to the emasculation of the Anti-Injunction Act, and down the companion pathway that leads to the blunting of the strict requirements of Williams Packing and, now, of Mr. Justice Brandeis’ opinion for a unanimous Court in Phillips v. Commissioner, 283 U. S. 589 (1931). The Court has taken this Laing-Shapiro tack, I suspect, as a response to what it deems to be administrative excesses with respect to suspected narcotics operatives who also are, or should be, taxpayers. Whether all this will prove to be stultifying or embarrassing to the collection of the revenues in a more temperate and untroubled time, I do not know. Perhaps, up to a point, the Congress will come to the rescue.
The Court, ante, at 624-626, n. 9, demonstrates, of course, that the present case is in a most unsatisfactory posture for review here. It is unfortunate that a case so posed occasions the pronouncement of new and, so far as tax collection efforts are concerned, regressive law.
I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.