John Ream wants to distill spirits in his own home for personal consumption, as many Americans do. Yet this hobby has long been banned by Congress. Anyone who attempts to participate in this pastime faces a $10,000 fine or up to 5 years in prison. Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Mr. Ream’s ongoing challenge against this law.
Congress claims that it can ban home distilling under its taxing power because doing so is “necessary and proper.” But Congress must do more than just say that its exercise of power is “necessary and proper”—it must actually show it is necessary and proper by demonstrating a strong link between an end goal and legislative means. The Founders established safeguards in the Constitution that would ensure laws would actually be essential and fall within Congress’s powers. Without such carefully crafted limits on its power, Congress could regulate practically anything and everything by claiming a broad power to tax whenever it seems convenient.
SLF most recently joined a coalition of groups in filing an amicus brief at the Supreme Court making this argument. It also filed briefs at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and in a similar case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals brought by a hobby distillery group.
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As SLF points out, the home distilling ban is neither necessary nor proper. The taxing power “is limited to requiring an individual to pay money into the Federal Treasury, no more.” There is no obvious connection between Congress’s power to tax and the ban on home distilling. Banning home distilling does nothing to raise revenue, nor does the ban prevent tax evasion; other laws already do that. On top of that, Congress is not collecting a tax at all here but trying to regulate behavior entirely separate from liquor taxes.
The home-distilling ban punishes individuals Congress can’t otherwise reach through regulation, and it is unconstitutional.