Don't Fall for Fool's Gold

Lately the Grand Old Party has been a search party, casting about for policy ideas and positions to make them more relevant to a wider range of voters.  In particular, some have been attracted by the shiny object deceptively titled the “Marketplace Fairness Act.”
 
As we have explained before (here and here) the Act is bad news, doing away with any requirement that a business have a physical connection to a jurisdiction before a tax can be levied.  If this law were to pass, the act of merely visiting a Website could be sufficient to require that business to pay taxes in that state.  
 
The pro-government expansionists are again up to their dirty tricks, attaching a vote on a deficit neutral reserve fund “allowing states to enforce state and local use tax laws and collect taxes on remote sales owed under state law” to a budget resolution so they can claim great support and trick the rest of the GOP into heading out into the big government wilderness without their Constitutional compass.
 
In fact, a vote in favor of this trick is a vote in favor of ending the long held physical nexus standard, and in favor of expansive government authority to bring the legal powers of tax enforcement beyond a state’s borders—a throwback to the Articles of Confederation.  A vote in favor means granting states powers as far-reaching, and as ephemeral, as the Internet.  This is hardly the stuff of a defender of limited government. 
 
Almost humorously, the supporters of the Act have recently asserted that the Supreme Court actually “invited” Congress to legislate away a physical presence standard (they didn’t—see the Quill Case).  But even if they had, the fact is that real economic damage, the same damage done under the Articles of Confederation, will result.
 
The lodestone should be indicating danger—expansive taxation authority because of radically expansive government undermining our Union.  If opposing such an expansion of government power doesn't define an elected Republican, an elected conservative, then it is hard to imagine what vote would, save the vote of public next November.