(Daily Caller)—The federal ban on at-home distilling — a hold over from the Prohibition Era — violates the U.S. Constitution, a new lawsuit argues.
The Hobby Distillers Association, an organization with over 1,300 members represented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), filed a federal lawsuit this month against the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TBB) and Department of Justice (DOJ) over the government’s ban on at-home distilling. The ban is not just “bad policy,” CEI’s General Counsel Dan Greenberg told the Daily Caller News Foundation, it’s also “inconsistent with a proper view of the limited government constraints of the Constitution.”
“The Constitution created a Federal Government of limited and enumerated powers,” the lawsuit states. “The at-home distilling ban is beyond all of the powers of Congress to enact under the Constitution.”
President Jimmy Carter signed legislation legalizing the practice of homebrewing federally in 1978, though home distilling remained illegal, according to the Smithsonian.
The lawsuit argues that the ban does not fall under Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce, as it operates locally, or the federal government’s taxing power, as it “raises no revenue.”
“The interstate sales of beer and wine are regulated in much the same way as the interstate sales of distilled beverage alcohol are regulated, but beer and wine can lawfully be produced at home under federal law,” it states.
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Distilling alcohol at home carries consequences of up to five years in prison or up to a $10,000 fine, per the TTB.
“While individuals of legal drinking age may produce wine or beer at home for personal or family use, Federal law strictly prohibits individuals from producing distilled spirits at home,” the TTB website states.
The activity would be properly regulated at the state level, CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. In some places, such as Alaska, Arizona, Massachusetts and Missouri, state laws allow individuals to distill alcohol at home, according to Reason.
The Ohio state senate introduced a bill in January 2023 that would permit any citizen over 21 to make up to 100 gallons of moonshine a year, according to News 5 Cleveland.
But because it’s still banned at the federal level, even home distillers in states that permit the practice could risk prosecution.
“Like so many laws in our overcriminalized society, however, there is uncertainty about how rigorously these laws are enforced,” C. Jarrett Dieterle, resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, wrote for Reason earlier this year. “Similar to homebrewers in the ’70s and ’80s, it’s likely that some of America’s craft distilleries started out as clandestine home distilling operations.”
“We believe that, under the Constitution, at-home distilling is an activity properly regulated at the state and not the federal level."
CEI's @LibertyDevin on our lawsuit with the Home Distillers Association against the federal ban on at-home distilling.https://t.co/Ci4w1w5fQW
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (@ceidotorg) December 15, 2023
Greenberg said the ban is “somewhere between 100 and 150 years old” and is part of a federal tax collecting statute, which appears “completely unrelated to the legitimate use of the powers of the federal government.”
“It’s perfectly legal to distill beverage alcohol in some circumstances, as long as you don’t do it on your home property,” he said. “And it’s perfectly legal to distill fuel alcohol on your home property, in some circumstances, as long as you have a permit…the product that is produced with respect to fuel alcohol and beverage alcohol are chemically identical.”
The plaintiffs are just trying to explore the hobby of distilling beverage alcohol, but want to do it legally, Greenberg said. The lawsuit notes that multiple “have legally distilled before and would be able to distill if the law allowed them to do so.”
The Hobby Distillery Association’s efforts to lobby Congress to repeal the federal prohibition have “been blocked by an industry that does not want more competition,” the lawsuit states.
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Smells like an end-around attack on the hobby classification altogether. Most hobbyists are hobbyists because they don’t make enough at it to be a business, can’t afford the exorbitant self-employment tax, or to pay commercial rates for utilities, and so on. Some may grow into a small business, others not. But it is how most small businesses start, and is how many large uselessness, such as HP, originally started.
Leftists want government control over all the means of production. Hobbies and small business are freedom, and stand in the way of the left’s marxist goals. As with California’s attempts to essentially outlaw independent contractors, as with measures taken during covid, they’ve got to destroy small business and entrepreneurship, in order to seize more control over production (which is also basically a goal of fascism). They don’t want you to be independent and able to do for yourself. Your skills and capabilities beyond what they consider to be necessary to meet your most basic needs, are considered their property. Which is, ironically, entirely at odds with the idea of being for workers. If it were really about impoverished workers, they would eliminate the self-employment tax and and commercial rates for services, for entrepreneurs and hobbyists making below a certain threshold. But it’s not about workers, and never has been. It’s about totalitarian control.
There’s bigger issues at play here, and I hope the hobbyists are considering all the possible ramifications. It is imperative that we keep the hobbyist classification, and do all we can to encourage small business and entrepreneurship.
People will look at this case and say, well, yeah there has to be some sort of regulation or people will be making deadly bathtub liquor. And that’s exactly what they want the reaction to be, when in all likelihood, their motives are significantly more nefarious.
Destroy the hobbyist classification, and next will be small business. They’ll go from smallest to next smallest, all the way up till there’s nothing left but ultra large corporations in cahoots with, if not owned by, the state – if owned by the state, then communism. If owned by private entities, on paper, then fascism. But the result is essentially the same.
Be careful …
Not “uselessness”, but “businesses”
Darned auto-correct.