Now you've done it. You've cited the 14th Amendment, the "red amendment" that gave the federal government all those powers.wserra wrote:A more recent court made exactly this point. "We have travelled far since Mr. Chief Justice Taney delivered his famous dictum that "a corporation can have no legal existence out of the boundaries of the sovereignty by which it is created," and found it necessary to resort to principles of comity in order to sustain its right to enforce a foreign bill of exchange it had purchased.2 [Footnote citing Earle - WS] . . . That notion, too, has been supplanted in the application of the limitations of the United States Constitution by a more direct and immediate approach to the question of fairness, which arises under the Fourteenth Amendment and which, alone, seems relevant and material. International Shoe Co. v. State of Washington, 326 U.S. 310". Westcott-Alexander, Inc. v. Dailey, 264 F.2d 853 (4th Cir. 1959).
Of course, the 14th Amendment (based on my memory of International Shoe) had the effect of limiting the powers of state governments, rather than extending the power of the federal government, because it held that states could not tax activities outside of the state. But the reality of the holding is irrelevant. The boogeyman is out of the bottle (to mix metaphors) and now we will be drenched (metaphorically) with the spittle of the self-educated constitutional "researchers" who know so much more for having read so much less.
(Although the point made in the 1959 decision is interesting, and one I don't remember hearing before. Rather than attempting to limit a state's power of taxation by some near-fiction of corporate existence, or comity, the International Shoe decision went to the heart of the matter and asked whether the imposition of the tax was "fair" under the circumstances, which is a more sensible and honest question.)
