850
MACHINES CORP.
Opinion of the Court
however, exempted pre-export goods and services from ordinary tax burdens; nor have we exempted from federal taxation various services and activities only tangentially related to the export process.
III
The Government concedes, as it did below, that this case is largely indistinguishable from Thames & Mersey and that, if Thames & Mersey is still good law, the tax assessed against IBM under § 4371 violates the Export Clause. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 5; 59 F. 3d, at 1237. The parties apparently agree that there is no legally significant distinction between the insurance policies at issue in this case and those at issue in Thames & Mersey, and, accordingly, the Government asks that we overrule Thames & Mersey.
The Government asserts that the Export Clause permits the imposition of generally applicable, nondiscriminatory taxes, even on goods in export transit. The Government urges that we have historically interpreted the Commerce, Import-Export, and Export Clauses in harmony and that we have rejected the theory underlying Thames & Mersey in the context of the Commerce and Import-Export Clauses. Accordingly, the Government contends that our Export Clause jurisprudence, symbolized by Thames & Mersey, has become an anachronism in need of modernization. The Government asks us to reinterpret the Export Clause to permit the imposition of generally applicable, nondiscriminatory taxes as we have under the Commerce Clause and, it argues, under the Import-Export Clause.
A
The Government contends that our dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence has shifted dramatically and that our traditional understanding of the Export Clause, which is based partly on an outmoded view of the Commerce Clause, can no longer be justified. It is true that some of our early Export Clause cases relied on an interpretation of the
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