🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7tirlh$d0k$1@agate-ether.berkeley.edu>,
D. Gerasimatos <dim@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:

>I certainly don't like paying fees. However, what was deemed
>unconstitutional about the fee?

The Commerce Clause.  Any law that discriminates against out of state goods
involves regulating interstate commerce, meaning that Congress could do it, or
it could explicitly allow the states to do it if it wanted to, but the states
cannot do it on their own.  There are some exceptions where the states have a 
very good reason, including environmental concerns, but here the
"environmental" argument was purely pretextual.

>It seems to me that the idea behind the
>fee is to discourage Californians from buying cars in states with
>less stringent pollution requirements and transporting them to California.

That was the official excuse; however, the fine applied to all out of state
cars, not just those from states with less stringent pollution requirements.
And most of its victims were people moving to California, not Californians
trying to circumvent California laws by buying their cars out of state.

>Of course, one might say that as long as the car can pass a California
>smog check then who cares, right? Is this the gist of the argument?

Sort of.  Actually, non-California cars are *not* held to the same standard.
But even if an out of state car happened to meet the more rigorous California
standard, the owner still got dinged.