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Opinion of the Court
supervision of local customs officials "in order to encourage merchants here and abroad to make use of American ports." Xerox Corp., supra, at 151. By allowing importers to defer taxes on imported goods for a period of time and to escape taxes altogether on reexported goods, the bonded warehouse system "enabled the importer, without any threat of financial loss, to place his goods in domestic markets or to return them to foreign commerce and, by this flexibility, encouraged importers to use American facilities." R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., supra, at 147. This federal objective would be frustrated by the imposition of state sales and property taxes on goods not destined for domestic distribution, regardless of whether the taxes themselves discriminated against goods based on their destination. Xerox Corp., supra, at 150-154. See also R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., supra, at 144-147; McGoldrick, supra, at 428-429.
In contrast, the federal regulatory scheme for containers used in foreign commerce discloses no congressional intent to exempt those containers from all or most domestic taxation. In Japan Line we said that the 1956 Container Convention acknowledged "[t]he desirability of uniform treatment of containers used exclusively in foreign commerce" and "reflect[ed] a national policy to remove impediments to the use of containers." 441 U. S., at 452-453. But we did not hold that the Convention and the federal regulatory scheme for cargo containers expressed a national policy to exempt containers from all domestic taxation. Rather, we relied on the federal laws, along with proof of an international customary norm of home port taxation and California's creation of an asymmetry in international maritime taxation, for our conclusion that California's ad valorem property tax violated the Foreign Commerce Clause by impeding the Government's ability to " 'spea[k] with one voice' " in conducting our Nation's foreign affairs. Ibid.
Itel does not better its pre-emption argument by claiming that the federal regulatory scheme for containers, like the
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