So long as the State by its laws, prescribing the mode and subjects of taxation, does not entrench upon the legitimate authority of the Union, or violate any right recognized, or secured by the Constitution of the United States, the (Supreme) Court, as between the State and its citizens, can afford no relief against State taxation, however unjust, oppressive, or onerous.
The discretion of the State,—that is, of the State Legislature, is beyond the power of the federal government, or any of its departments, to supervise or control.[109]
43. The fundamental idea in America is that each government—the State, the national—possesses powers and functions adequate to its own ends and purposes. Thus the State has no power to lay a tax on any constitutional means employed by the government of the Union to execute its powers, otherwise, by taxation of such means or agencies,—say the mail, the mint, judicial process, patent rights,—the States might defeat all the ends of the national government,—a design not intended by the people of the United States.[110] But this protection of government is not limited to the United States by limiting the States; it applies to the States as limiting the United States.
The sovereign powers vested in the State governments by their respective constitutions, remain unaltered and unimpaired, except so far as they were granted to the government of the United States.[111] As the powers not delegated were reserved to the States respectively, or to the people, the government of the United States can claim no powers not so delegated, and the powers actually granted must be such as are expressly given, or given by necessary implication.
In our complex system, the existence of the States in their separate and independent condition
is so indispensable, that without them the general government itself would disappear from the family of nations.[112] Whence the necessary conclusion that the means and instrumentalities employed for carrying on the operations of their governments (the State governments), for preserving their existence, and fulfilling the high and responsible duties assigned to them in the Constitution, should be left free and unimpaired, should not be liable to be crippled, much less defeated by the taxing power of another government, which power acknowledges no limits but the will of the legislative body imposing the tax, and more especially, those means and instrumentalities which are the creation of their sovereign and reserved rights, one of which is the establishment of the judicial department, and the appointing of officers to administer the laws. Without this power and the exercise of it, no one of the States, under the form of government guaranteed by the Constitution, could long preserve its existence.[113]
44. One of the reserved powers of the States was to establish a judicial department.
All of the thirteen States were in possession of this power, and had exercised it at the adoption of the Constitution; and it is not pretended that any grant of it to the general government is found in that instrument. It is therefore one of the sovereign powers vested in the States by their constitutions, which remained unaltered and unimpaired, and in respect to which the State is as independent of the general government as that government is independent of the States. In respect to reserved powers, the State is as sovereign and as independent as the general government.[114]
The means and instrumentalities employed by the one government to carry its powers into operation are as necessary to its self-preservation as the means and instrumentalities are necessary to the other. Unimpaired existence is as essential to the one as to the other. There is no express provision in the Constitution that prohibits the general government from taxing the means and instrumentalities of the States, or prohibiting such taxation.
In both cases the exemption rests upon necessary implication, and is upheld by the great law of self-preservation; as any government whose means employed in conducting its operations, if subject to the control of another and distinct government, can exist only at the mercy of that government.[115]