An “act of war” is how one Indian chief in New York State characterizes the passage in Albany of the latest cigarette tax increase. The New York Times doesn’t name the Indian chief, but those are the words with which the Times paraphrases his views in respect  of tax increases in Governor Paterson’s emergency spending bill that, the Times reports, will make cigarettes in New York the most heavily taxed in the nation. What may be the “most controversial provisions” in the bill, the Times reports are provisions that the state will “begin collecting — or try to collect — taxes on cigarettes sold on Indian reservations to off-reservation visitors.”

One thing one is tempted to say about this is, “God bless the Noble Smoker,” that unfailing hero of our fiscal crises who is, at one and the same time, turned out of every school, office, airport and even park, to do his puffing on the curb and also required to underwrite, to a far greater degree than any other citizen, the spending addiction of every legislator in the state. Without the noble smoker, these billions would have to be coughed up, so to speak, by the rest of the long-suffering citizens of the state. So God bless the Noble Smoker. Let us hail his sacrifices.

The best theater for the coming Indian war, in any event, may be in federal court, where, it wouldn’t surprise were both the Noble Smoker and the Indians to be found to have the Constitution on their side. That is how it looks to those who believe in the importance of the idea of enumerated powers — the idea that our federal government has only those powers that are enumerated in the Constitution but that, once enumerated, those powers are something to which one owes deference. And one of the clearest enumerations — it’s in Article 1, Section 8 — grants to the United States Congress, not to the states, the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

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We mention that not because of any notion that the issue of cigarettes is of outsized importance. But the issue of enumerated powers is another matter altogether. The question of off-reservation cigarette sales looks, on its face, to be less an issue of taxes and more a matter of regulating commerce with the Indian tribes. And if it is enumerated as one of the specific grants of power to the Congress of the United States, what is the legislature in Albany doing in the matter at all? By our lights it would be important to the federal government to protect its own interest in this fight, since foreign competition — or competition from Indian tribes — can be seen as part of the system of checks and balances that limits the ability of our own state governments to abuse their own powers.