Bode v. Barrett Co-ordinated Transport of Illinois/Concurrence Burton

by Harold Hitz Burton

United States Supreme Court

344 U.S. 583

BODE et al.  v.  BARRETT, Secretary of State of Illinois et al. CO-ORDINATED TRANSPORT, Inc., OF ILLINOIS et al.

 Argued: Feb. 9, 1953. --- Decided: April 6, 1953

Mr. Justice BURTON concurs in the result.

Mr. Justice CLARK took no part in the consideration or decision of these cases.

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, whom Mr. Justice JACKSON joins, dissenting.

The problem of this case is not met by asserting that a tax ranging as high as $1,580 per truck does not present an issue under the Commerce Clause because the carriers do intrastate as well as interstate business and the tax, therefore, does not as a matter of law affect commerce among the States. (The Court apparently deems the size of the tax immaterial since it does not mention the amounts involved.) It has been suggested in a cognate situation, though one involving a comparatively trifling exaction, that interstate commerce is unconstitutionally burdened solely because the taxpayer's interstate business increases the number of trucks on which the tax is levied and hence the total amount due from him. One does not have to embrace this suggestion to find the Court's position in this case unsupportable. For the Court declares appellants' claim under the Commerce Clause baseless although it does not 'stop to analyze the evidence tendered by appellants.'

The Court disposes of the contention that the judgments below offend the Commerce Clause by concluding that it need not 'reach the issue in this case.' Its reasoning is as follows: all the interstate carriers here are engaged in intrastate commerce as well; were they not engaged in interstate commerce at all, they could be taxed on account of their intrastate operations; since none of the appellants thus pays an additional tax for its interstate operations, none is in a position to claim the protection of the Commerce Clause. Consideration of a challenge to a tax under the Due Process Clause, which the Court does undertake (reaching conclusions I agree with), does not, of course, bar appellants from challenging the tax under the Commerce Clause. Hence the Court's refusal, on the ground that 'it does not reach the issue,' 'to analyze the evidence' on which the Commerce Clause contention rests can only mean that the Court finds that appellants had no standing to sue under the Commerce Clause, albeit the formal phrase is withheld.

For this truly startling conclusion we are vouchsafed no authority except: 'Cf. Southern R. Co. v. King, 217 U.S. 524, 534, 30 S.Ct. 594, 596, 54 L.Ed. 868.' On its facts the King case has nothing whatever to do with the problem before us. The passage to which the citation refers simply repeats the self-evident proposition that only one whose alleged constitutional rights are affected by a State statute can assail it. But whether appellants are so affected is the very question at the threshold of the constitutional issue: is the tax forbidden by the Commerce Clause. Being engaged in interstate commerce, appellants invoke the Commerce Clause against an Illinois statute which affects them because it taxes them. Whether or not the effect on them is unconstitutional is the question which, in compliance with settled procedural rules, they have brought here on appeal.

If it is indeed true, as the Court holds, that one who is engaged both in intrastate and interstate commerce has no standing to challenge a tax such as this under the Commerce Clause because the State might, perchance, extract the same dollars and cents from him even if he engaged in intrastate commerce alone, then this Court has long been entertaining, ignorantly and wastefully, cases which it had no power to hear.

The taxation and licensing by the States of commingled, though not necessarily inextricably commingled, intrastate and interstate business, or of the instrumentalities of such commingled business, have again and again been considered here to determine whether such an assertion of the taxing power by the States had, in its practical incidence, cast an inadmissible burden upon the interstate aspect of the joint enterprise. Can it be that all these cases could quickly and easily have been disposed of by suggesting that the taxpayer could in any event have been taxed on his intrastate operations? As far back as 1888, in Leloup v. Port of Mobile, 127 U.S. 640, 8 S.Ct. 1380, 32 L.Ed. 311, the Court struck down because of the Commerce Clause a tax attacked by a taxpayer doing both intrastate and interstate business. In a hundred-odd cases since, a claim under the Commerce Clause in similar situations was considered. (This does not mean it always prevailed.) Can it be that all our predecessors bothered their heads needlessly? Indeed, ever since Western Union Tel. Co. v. State of Kansas, 216 U.S. 1, 30 S.Ct. 190, 54 L.Ed. 355, and Pullman Co. v. State of Kansas, 216 U.S. 56, 30 S.Ct. 232, 54 L.Ed. 378, it has been settled that a State may not exclude a foreign corporation from doing merely local business if such exclusion would 'unreasonably burden' the nonexcludable interstate business. (I am not now concerned with what is and what is not such an 'unreasonable burden.') Under today's holding, was there standing in these cases?

A word on the merits. Of course a State may tax for the use of its roads by carriers engaged in interstate commerce, whether they carry local goods as well or do an exclusive interstate business. But this states the beginning of a problem in constitutional law; it does not give the answer. The real question is how the State makes the exaction-that is, what is the nature of the exaction, its basis and its practical operation. As the Court does not reach this question, it would serve no purpose for me to do so.

Notes