Live Free or Die
Attorney General Cuomo is reviewing the decision of the United States Supreme Court yesterday that gives truckers the right to deliver cigarettes in interstate commerce. The decision came in a case called Rowe v. New Hampshire Motor Transport, in which Rowe was the hapless attorney general of the state of Maine, who tried to enforce a measure making it difficult for truckers to bring cigarettes into America's vacationland. New Hampshire Motor Transport was representing interstate trucking companies, who reckon they shouldn't have to worry about a patchwork of state regulations as they carried on the commerce that binds this country together. The Supreme Court ruled that under American law it is the federal government not the states that gets to regulate this kind of interstate trucking. New Hampshire truckers lived up to the state motto, "Live Free or Die." As for Maine, its motto, "I Dirigo," which means "I Lead," should be changed to, "Yes, Your Honors."
The opening for Mr. Cuomo comes because in 2000, New York State passed a law of its own that forbade truckers from delivering tobacco to anyone in the state. It was billed as being animated by concern for health, but that was a bogus claim all along. It was really an effort by the state government to block the inter-state delivery of mail-order cigarettes so that it could protect its own revenues via the excise it collects on the sale of cigarettes. Governor Pataki then and Governor Spitzer now, not to mention Mayor Bloomberg, are in the cigarette business for huge amounts of money. And they've been way up on their high horses; Mr. Spitzer used the threat of criminal prosecution to get the United Parcel Service to agree not to deliver cigarettes anywhere in the country. Customers of UPS be damned.
It looks like the legal underpinnings for that whole regime are now in jeopardy after Rowe. The Supreme Court saw through the claims about how Maine and other states were animated by concern for the public health. It ruled nine to zero that this kind of regulation of what truckers do is a matter for the federal government, not for the individual states. So Mr. Cuomo has got the governor, whose job he covets, exposed as a law enforcement officer who doesn't know his constitution. A UPS spokesman is telling our Joseph Goldstein that it is going to stick by its settlement with Mr. Spitzer and refrain from delivering tobacco. Presumably other companies more committed to their customers will pick up this work that the Supreme Court has just ruled — again, nine to zero — is something the state of New York has no business trying to regulate.
