Comment by avidiax

Edit: According to AI, I've got this a bit backwards. The ruling hits the taxing power, not the commerce clause. It's nonetheless interesting, since the machine gun ban may be affected.

The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.

That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.

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I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.

It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.

That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.

The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.

If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.

That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.

The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.

How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.

It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn