Johnson v. State of Maryland, 289
Decision Date | 08 November 1920 |
Docket Number | No. 289,289 |
Citation | 65 L.Ed. 126,254 U.S. 51,41 S.Ct. 16 |
Parties | JOHNSON v. STATE OF MARYLAND |
Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Mr. W. C. Herron, of Washington, D. C., for plaintiff in error.
Messrs. Alexander Armstrong and J. Purdon Wright, both of Baltimore, Md., for the State of Maryland.
[Argument of Counsel from pages 51-55 intentionally omitted] Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
The plaintiff in error was an employee of the Post Office Department of the United States, and while driving a government motor truck in the transportation of mail over a post road from Mt. Airy, Maryland, to Washington, was arrested in Maryland, and was tried, convicted and fined for so driving without having obtained a license from the State. He saved his constitutional rights by motion to quash, by special pleas which were overruled upon demurrer and by motion in arrest of judgment. The facts were admitted and the naked question is whether the State has power to require such an employe to obtain a license by submitting to an examination concerning his competence and paying three dollars, before performing his official duty in obedience to superior command.
The cases upon the regulation of interstate commerce can not be relied upon as furnishing an answer. They deal with the conduct of private persons in matters in which the States as well as the general government have an interest and which would be wholly under the control of the States but for the supervening destination and the ultimate purpose of the acts. Here the question is whether the State can interrupt the acts of the general government itself. With regard to taxation, no matter how reasonable, or how universal and undiscriminating, the State's inability to interfere has been regarded as established since McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 4 L. Ed. 579. The decision in that case was not put upon any consideration of degree but upon the entire absence of power on the part of the States to touch, in that way at least, the instrumentalities of the United States; 4 Wheat. 429, 430, 4 L. Ed. 579; and that is the law today. Farmers' & Mechanics' Savings Bank v. Minnesota, 232 U. S. 516, 525, 526, 34 Sup. Ct. 354, 58 L. Ed. 706. A little later the scope of the proposition as then understood was indicated in Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheat. 738, 867 (6 L. Ed. 204)——
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