Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in response to my friend from Tennessee, the first thing I will say is the tools we have today were not available 20 years ago. The simplification, the immediacy of buying a $15 opportunity from e-bay so you can collect sales tax in all jurisdictions on products that are unique to each State, that was not even a thought when we litigated Quill. Yet we came pretty close to convincing the Court this should be allowed under the interstate commerce clause. I think, at the end of the day, the Court decided that case because they were concerned mainly about retroactivity. But now, if we compare the experience of 20 years ago to what we know in terms of data availability and the ease of administration today, which is being further streamlined by requiring a streamlined tax, one single tax base--what do I mean by that? The city of Fargo imposes sales tax. Let's assume for a moment we allow them to tax different products than what the State taxes. This requires one tax per product. We don't get to have different tax bases. So we have streamlined that piece that concerned the Court at the time. When we think about it, local sales taxes were not unique and were prevalent even at the time we litigated Quill. This argument was overwhelming for the Court. They looked at the burden on interstate commerce, coupled with the potential of retroactive application, which would have meant huge audits where there was no opportunity to collect, and said: You know what.…”