[chasil]

Now is the time for anyone to get California in front of Clarence Thomas.

"The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States."

A sole owner of an Illinois business could be read in that text to have immunity from the California "minimum franchise tax."

It would be helpful to see the Supreme Court remove California's abusive interstate taxation.

[gamblor956]

The P&I clause simply means that states can't discriminate against people from other states. This was explicitly clear in the original (Articles of Confederation) version of the clause, which stated that citizens of one state traveling to or doing business in other state were "subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof."

This means, for example, that if a state wants to tax residents of other states that do business in their state, they have to tax their own residents for the same activities.

So, if CA wants to tax an Illinois business for its activities in CA, it would have to tax CA residents for those same activities. And CA absolutely does.

[otterley]

The Privileges and Immunities clause has only been interpreted once by the Supreme Court and only (so far) protects the right to interstate travel (on your own two feet, BTW). It has never been held to forbid interstate taxation, and in fact, the right to interstate taxation was recently expanded in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. (2018) when the Court was already conservative-leaning.

The plain text of the Constitution often does not mean what laypeople think it means.

[AdrianB1]

> The plain text of the Constitution often does not mean what laypeople think it means.

"We the people" does not seem to be written for Ivy League lawyers to understand and translate to laypeople. A Constitution written in a way that only a small percent of people are "trained" or "authorized" to understand or apply is a big time failure. Just sayin'

[mrguyorama]

The constitution was pretty clearly, from day one, written by educated 1%'ers, FOR educated 1%'ers. It was never meant to protect or privilege the laypeople except by accident and vague notions of "everyone deserves rights, except for those that improve self governance, only white landowners deserve that"

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The problem is not the way the Constitution is written. It's a bunch of people who think that their understanding of, for example, "Privileges and Immunities" is obviously correct.