Every word of the law that the Supreme Court explained to us in 1936 remains the same. Everything that court said about it and its meaning remains true right now.
"That a so-called excise tax, imposed by the Act, of 15% of the sale price or market value at the mine of all bituminous coal produced in the country, subject to a draw-back of 13 1/2% allowed to those producers who submit to the price-fixing and labor, provisions of the Act, is not a tax, but a penalty to coerce submission, and cannot be upheld as an expression of the taxing power."
Peter Hendrickson, Lost Horizons Newsletter
June 29, 2012
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| U.S. Supreme Court CERTIORARI TO THE CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT Held: (1) That a so-called excise tax, imposed by the Act, of 15% of the sale price or market value at the mine of all bituminous coal produced in the country, subject to a draw-back of 13 1/2% allowed to those producers who submit to the price-fixing and labor provisions of the Act, is not a tax, but a penalty to coerce submission, and cannot be upheld as an expression of the taxing power. (2) The provisions of the Act looking to the control of the wages, hours, and working conditions of the miners engaged in the production of coal, and seeking to guarantee their right of collective bargaining in these matters, are beyond the powers of Congress, because -- (a) The Constitution grants to Congress no general power to regulate for the promotion of the general welfare. (b) The power expressly granted Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not include the power to control the conditions in which coal is produced before it becomes an article of commerce. (c) The effect on interstate commerce in the coal of labor conditions involved in its production, including disputes and strikes over wages, etc., is an indirect effect. (3) Since a mine owner, by refusing to accept the regulatory provisions, would incur a prohibitive tax and be deprived, by other provisions of the Act, of the right to sell coal to the United States or to any of its contractors for use in performing their contracts, the regulations are, in fact, compulsory. In view of this compulsion, provisions of the Act seeking to authorize part of the producers and miners to fix hours for the entire industry, and part of the producers and miners in the districts to fix minimum wages in their districts, are legislative delegation in its most obnoxious form, and clearly violate the Fifth Amendment. (4) The price-fixing provisions are not separable from the provisions concerning labor, and therefore cannot stand independently. They are so related to and dependent upon the labor provisions, as conditions, considerations or compensations, as to make it clearly probable that, the latter being held bad, the former would not have been passed. (5) The constitutionality of the price-fixing provisions is not considered. 4. Whether the end sought to be attained by an Act of Congress is legitimate is wholly a matter of constitutional power, and not at all of legislative discretion. Beneficent aims, however great or well directed, can never serve in lieu of power. 5. To a constitutional end, many ways are open; but to an end not within the terms of the Constitution, all ways are closed. 6. The proposition, often advanced and as often discredited, that the power of the federal government inherently extends to all purposes affecting the Nation as a whole with which the States severally cannot deal, or deal adequately, and the related notion that Congress, entirely apart from those powers delegated by the Constitution, may enact laws to promote the general welfare, have always been definitely rejected by this Court. 7. Those who framed and those who adopted the Constitution meant to carve from the general mass of legislative powers then possessed by the States only such portions as it was thought wise to confer upon the federal government, and, in order that there should be no uncertainty as to what was taken and what was left, the national powers of legislation were not aggregated, but enumerated -- with the result that what was not embraced by the enumeration remained vested in the States without change or impairment. 8. The States, in respect of all powers reserved to them, are supreme. And since every addition to the national legislative power to some extent detracts from or invades the power of the States, it is of vital moment that, in order to preserve the fixed balance intended by the Constitution, the powers of the general government be not so extended as to embrace any not within the express terms of the several grants or the implications necessarily to be drawn therefrom. 9. The general government possesses no inherent power over the internal affairs of the States, and emphatically not with regard to legislation. 10. The determination of the Framers Convention and the ratifying conventions to preserve complete and unimpaired state self-government in all matters not committed to the national government is one of the plainest facts in the history of their deliberations. Adherence to that determination is incumbent equally upon the federal government and the States. State powers can neither be appropriated, on the one hand, nor abdicated, on the other. 11. If the federal government once begins taking over the powers of the States, the States may be so despoiled of their powers, or -- what may amount to the same thing -- be so relieved of the responsibilities which the possession of the powers necessarily enjoins, as to reduce them to little more than geographical divisions of the national domain. 12. The Constitution is a law -- the supreme law of the land. Judicial tribunals are required to apply the law to the facts in every case properly brought before them, and, in so doing, they are bound to give effect to this supreme law as against any mere statute conflicting with it. 13. In the discharge of that duty, the opinion of the lawmakers that a statute passed by them is valid must be given great weight; but their opinion, or the court's opinion, that the statute will prove greatly or generally beneficial is wholly irrelevant to the inquiry. 14. As used in the commerce clause of the Constitution, the term "commerce" is the equivalent of intercourse for the purposes of trade, and includes transportation, purchase, sale and exchange of commodities between citizens of the different States. The power to regulate commerce embraces the instruments by which commerce is carried on. 15. Production and manufacture of commodities are not commerce, even when done with intent to sell or transport the commodities out of the State. 16. The possibility or even certainty of the exportation of a product or an article from a State does not put it in interstate commerce before it has begun to move from the State. To hold otherwise would be to nationalize all industries. 17. One who produces or manufactures a commodity, subsequently sold and shipped by him in interstate commerce, whether such sale and shipment were originally intended or not, has engaged in two distinct and separate activities. So far as he produces or manufactures it, his business is purely local. So far as he sells or ships it, or contracts to do so, to customers in another State, he engages in interstate commerce. In respect of the former, he is subject to regulation by the State; in respect of the latter, to regulation only by the federal government. Production is not commerce, but a step in preparation for commerce. 18. The incidents leading up to and culminating in the mining of coal -- the employment of men, the fixing of their wages, hours of labor and working conditions, the bargaining in respect of these things -- each and all constitute intercourse for the purposes of production, not of trade. Commerce in the coal is not brought into being by force of these purely local activities, but by negotiations, agreements and circumstances entirely apart from production. Mining brings the subject matter of commerce into existence; commerce disposes of it. 19. To say that an activity or condition has a "direct" effect upon commerce implies that it operates proximately -- not mediately, remotely, or collaterally -- to produce the effect, without the presence of any efficient intervening agency or condition. 20. The distinction between a direct and an indirect effect upon interstate commerce is independent of the magnitude of the effect or of its cause. 21. The evils which come to interstate commerce from struggles between employer and employees over the matter of wages, working conditions, the right of collective bargaining, etc., and the resulting strikes, curtailment and irregularity of production and effect on prices, however extensive such evils may be, affect interstate commerce in a secondary and indirect way; they are local evils over which the federal government has no legislative control. 22. The want of power in the federal government is the same whether the wages, hours of service, and working conditions and the bargaining about them, are related to production before interstate commerce has begun, or to sale and distribution after it has ended. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495. 23. A declaration in a statute that invalidity of any of its provisions shall not affect the others reverses the presumption of inseparability, but it does not alter the rule that, if one of two mutually dependent parts be unconstitutional, the other cannot be upheld. *** Isn't it refreshing to hear the United States Supreme Court rule like this? Clear, rational, and properly hostile to an activist central state apparatus eager to slip the traces and run amok. Everything said in this decision is thoroughly grounded in a massive prior jurisprudence, as well as a fairly solid grounding in the framer's intent and a consequent reading of the Constitution in an internally-consistent fashion (none of which has anything to do with the issue of coal mining or its practices, per se, but only with who has the actual lawful authority to say what about what, and who doesn't). Practically seems surreal, doesn't it? Actually, the reason this five-and-a-half to three-and-a-half decision seems so extraordinary to modern sensibilities is that it was handed down in 1936, just a year before FDR threatened his "court-packing" scheme by which enough additional justices would be put on the bench to thwart sensible, Constitutionally-grounded ruling like this one and turn the court into a rubber-stamp for the ambitions of those who sought to rule and exploit the rest of us. The threat worked (with a little help from Father Time, as a number of the justices responsible for rulings like the one above which Roosevelt and his fellow-travelers found so inhibiting retired). One would be hard-pressed to find a single Supreme Court ruling in which a federal enactment was struck down as unconstitutional from 1937 until 1995 (the Lopez case striking down the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990), and precious few since '95, too. That's the kind of Leviathan-serving "jurisprudence" we've all come to view as "normal", making the ruling above seem like nothing but a utopian fantasy. But you know what? The Constitution hasn't changed during those years. The law is still the same law that it was when Justice Sutherland wrote the opinion in Carter v. Carter Coal Co.. What HAS changed is that too many Americans have lost their own personal understanding of the law, or their respect for it, and for themselves. By the late thirties, practically a whole generation of Americans had been turned over to government schools for indoctrination. Many of their parents had been through those mis-education mills, too, and even those that hadn't were hapless consumers of Leviathan-boosting media. Plus, the dark influence of the Fed-induced Great Depression clouded the thinking of those who might otherwise have known better. Once the High Court began surrendering to the statists' lust, an avalanche of bad jurisprudence started rolling over the judicial landscape, eventually establishing a vast constituency invested in an unrestrained central government. The war of all against all, in which everyone struggles to live at the expense of his neighbor, was launched. Everyone began vying for control of the apparatus of state power in order to be the ones doing the getting, since the only alternative was to be the ones being got. Americans in great numbers took up dependency as a lifestyle. Others bought into socialist and historical myths undermining our understanding about property, personal rights, and the purpose of government. Many just let the increasing pace of technical innovations, an apparent material prosperity, and foreign and domestic hobgoblins danced before their wide eyes by political "engineers of consent" distract them from their roles as grown-ups responsible for keeping America the land of the free and the home of the brave. In short, the people grew increasingly contemptible, and those in control of the apparatus of the state grew increasingly contemptuous of them, and of their law. We have reached the point now where an American president can refer to the Constitution as a "G**damned piece of paper!" and not only not be hauled from the White House by a mob of infuriated citizens, but be re-elected. But you know what? The Constitution is STILL the law of the land, and it is still the only authority by which those who wield power as governors in this country do so. To the degree that those wielders of power violate or conflict with the Constitution, they are still outside the law, and without authority, however much Americans may have gotten out of the habit of holding them to account for their transgressions, or withdrawing our support from them. The only thing that changed is us. Every word of the law that the Supreme Court explained to us in 1936 remains the same. Everything that court said about it and its meaning remains true right now. "That a so-called excise tax, imposed by the Act, of 15% of the sale price or market value at the mine of all bituminous coal produced in the country, subject to a draw-back of 13 1/2% allowed to those producers who submit to the price-fixing and labor, provisions of the Act, is not a tax, but a penalty to coerce submission, and cannot be upheld as an expression of the taxing power." Think about Obamacare... "The proposition, often advanced and as often discredited, that the power of the federal government inherently extends to all purposes affecting the Nation as a whole with which the States severally cannot deal, or deal adequately, and the related notion that Congress, entirely apart from those powers delegated by the Constitution, may enact laws to promote the general welfare, have always been definitely rejected by this Court." Think about darn near everything else Leviathan does, or wants to do... "The Constitution is a law -- the supreme law of the land. Judicial tribunals are required to apply the law to the facts in every case properly brought before them, and, in so doing, they are bound to give effect to this supreme law as against any mere statute conflicting with it. "In the discharge of that duty, the opinion of the lawmakers that a statute passed by them is valid must be given great weight; but their opinion, or the court's opinion, that the statute will prove greatly or generally beneficial is wholly irrelevant to the inquiry." Think about whose law the Court speaks of, and the relationship of people to government that these words recognize and honor. It's OUR LAW, people, and it's up to us to resume our roles as stewards of our own sovereignty. That's what this CtC community is all about (click here for a quick introduction or refresher). That's what the noble men and women honored here and here every week are all about. That's what those honored here are all about. That's what YOU need to be all about, and what you need to urge your families, and friends and neighbors, and co-workers and acquaintances to be all about. Americans have slept at the wheel so long that this country is now careening toward a cliff-edge. Time to get back in control, however difficult or inconvenient it may be. But it's not as hard as it may sound. After all, we've got the law on our side... Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated." -Thomas Paine |
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