If Sanctuary Rules Applied to Your Unpaid Taxes, a Satirical Thought Experiment

Let us get the label out of the way before the first joke. What follows is a thought experiment, and a satirical one. The city, the mayor, the council, the residents and every meeting described in the next few sections are invented, and none of it happened. No sentence in the satire should be read as a report of anything. After the satire I will step out of it and argue the real principle in plain language, including the part where the other side has a better point than conservatives usually admit.

Ready? Then let us visit the City of Pleasantville, a place that exists only in this post.

The resolution

The Pleasantville City Council meets on a Tuesday evening in an auditorium decorated with a banner reading "A Welcoming Community." The agenda has one item: Resolution 14, "Declaring Pleasantville a Sanctuary City for Taxpayers."

The resolution is read aloud by a clerk with the gravity of a man reading the Gettysburg Address. It says, in its operative paragraphs, that the city of Pleasantville will not provide the Internal Revenue Service with any information about residents, will not honor any IRS request to hold or notify, will not permit city employees to speak with federal revenue agents during working hours, and will not allow IRS personnel to enter city property without a judicial warrant signed by a judge the city regards as sufficiently sympathetic.

A councilwoman speaks in favor. "Our residents live in fear," she says. "A knock on the door from a revenue agent can tear a family apart. We cannot have a situation where a mother stops going to the grocery store because she has not filed her 2019 return." There is applause. The councilwoman adds that the city's "tax-compliance-neutral" policy will foster trust between the community and local government, so that residents will feel safe coming forward to report crimes, even if they owe money.

A councilman asks a clarifying question. "Does this mean the city will help people who owe taxes?"

"No, no," says the councilwoman. "The city will simply decline to cooperate. We are not helping anyone evade anything. We are just not helping anyone else enforce anything."

The resolution passes, five to two. The mayor signs it and announces that the city has taken a "courageous stand for compassion." The local paper runs the story under the headline "Pleasantville Embraces Tax-Status Diversity."

Month two

Our satire moves forward. By the second month of the policy, Pleasantville has acquired a tax-compliance-neutral city seal. A coalition of local nonprofits has launched a "Know Your Rights" campaign, with refrigerator magnets that read "I Do Not Consent to Revenue Inquiries." A downtown law firm advertises free consultations for "residents with complicated filing histories." A local café introduces a sandwich called the Sanctuary Club, though the menu does not specify what is in it, on the principle that the kitchen has a right not to disclose.

An IRS agent, a fictional one, naturally, arrives to deliver a notice to a resident who is, according to federal records, three years behind on a very large bill. The city clerk's office informs the agent that the office is closed for a "compassion in public service workshop" and that the policy forbids anyone on staff from telling the agent whether the resident lives in the city.

The agent checks the records. The resident is on the voter rolls, a library card list and a recreation-center membership. The agent is told that city staff cannot confirm or deny any of these.

Meanwhile, the city's staff are having an excellent day. The mayor appears on cable news explaining that it is not the city's job to carry out federal tax collection, and that Pleasantville's duty is to its residents. A guest on the program, a professor, observes that tax law is "a patchwork of complex civil obligations that have an outsize impact on vulnerable communities." The host, nodding, asks whether the real issue is that the federal government is too eager to collect.

I am exaggerating, and I am doing it on purpose. A satire does what the other side's logic would do if it were followed one step further than its defenders take it. And at this point in the story, dear reader, I would like to ask you a question, because it is the question the whole piece was built to ask: how long do you think this would last?

The honest answer

The honest answer is: not long. Within a few months, in our satire, a federal court would almost certainly order Pleasantville to stop interfering with the collection of a tax that Congress had validly imposed, and the city's resolution would run into a clause of the Constitution that was written to prevent precisely this situation.

Which brings us out of the satire and into the real argument.

The real principle: uniform law

Here is the claim, defined and stated plainly. A law that applies to every person in the country applies equally in every jurisdiction in the country, and no city or state gets to carve itself an exemption by resolution. This is the principle of uniform law, and the Founders built it into the structure of the Constitution on purpose.

The text is in Article VI, Clause 2, the Supremacy Clause. Read it slowly, because every phrase counts: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Three phrases do the work.

1. "Made in Pursuance thereof." The clause does not make every federal act supreme. It makes supreme the laws that are made in pursuance of the Constitution, which means laws within Congress's enumerated powers. That is a limit on Washington as well as a power for it, and conservatives should never forget the limit.
2. "The supreme Law of the Land." Not a suggestion. Not one input to a negotiation. The word is supreme.
3. "Any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." The Founders anticipated that states and their subdivisions would sometimes want to go their own way, and they wrote the answer down in advance.

Why did they bother? Because they had just lived through the Articles of Confederation, under which Congress could ask the states to pay and the states could simply decline. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was called largely because a government that could only request things did not work. Hamilton makes the point in the Federalist papers again and again: a law with no way to compel obedience is a recommendation. The Supremacy Clause is how the recommendation became a law.

The satire's weak point, stated fairly

I promised you the other side's best argument, and a serious conservative should know it, because it is real. If I pretended it was not, a good liberal lawyer would take me apart.

Pleasantville's resolution, in the satire, went too far because it tried to obstruct the federal government: to stop agents from entering city property, to block them from getting information through lawful channels. But there is a narrower version of the policy that is a different matter entirely, and the Supreme Court has said so.

The doctrine is called anti-commandeering. In New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997), the Court held that the federal government may not conscript state and local officials to carry out a federal regulatory program. In Printz, the Court struck down a provision of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act that required local sheriffs to run background checks. In Murphy v. NCAA (2018), the Court applied the same principle to hold that Congress cannot directly order a state to keep a law on its books. These are decisions in the federalist tradition that conservatives have generally celebrated. The principle is that Washington may regulate people, but it may not turn state governments into its own employees.

So the honest version of the sanctuary argument goes like this. One: Pleasantville's city police are employees of Pleasantville, not of the Treasury. Two: the Constitution forbids Congress from ordering them to enforce a federal program. Three: therefore a city may decline to volunteer its own staff and jail space to a federal enforcement effort. Four: that is not obstruction, it is abstention, and the Tenth Amendment protects abstention.

This is a better argument than the satire's resolution deserved, and a conservative who cares about federalism should say so. The Tenth Amendment is not a one-way street. If we want states to be able to resist Washington on health mandates or environmental rules, we cannot pretend the principle vanishes when the issue is immigration.

Where the analogy holds and where it breaks

Here is the answer to the best objection, in order, because the real argument is about where abstention ends and obstruction begins.

1. Declining to help is lawful. Interfering is not. A city that says "we will not use our own jail to hold people for federal agents" is invoking anti-commandeering. A city that hides a person from federal agents, tips him off, or physically blocks a lawful arrest is breaking federal law, and no clause of the Constitution protects it. The Supremacy Clause governs the second case, and the Tenth Amendment protects the first. The line between them is what the lawsuits are about.
2. Information sharing is the contested ground. Congress wrote two provisions in 1996, one in 8 U.S.C. 1373 and one in 8 U.S.C. 1644, that prohibit state and local governments from restricting communication with federal immigration authorities about a person's status. Whether those provisions survive after Murphy is a question the lower courts have argued over, and I will not pretend the answer is settled. If you want the legal detail, see What an ICE Detainer Actually Asks a Local Jail to Do and Why It Matters for how the detainer works in practice.
3. The tax analogy tests consistency, not law. I did not choose the IRS for the satire because the legal doctrine is identical. I chose it because the principle of selective cooperation is the same, and because a reader's gut reaction is instructive. If you felt, reading the resolution, that a city has no business shielding delinquent taxpayers, ask yourself where that feeling came from. It came from the idea that a law, passed by a legitimate legislature and applicable to everyone, ought to apply to everyone. Then ask whether you hold that conviction only when you agree with the law.

That last question cuts both ways, and I want it to. A conservative who loves the uniform-law principle for immigration has to accept it when the issue is a federal law he dislikes. And a progressive who cheers sanctuary policy has to explain why a conservative state or city may not use the same logic to refuse to enforce a federal rule on firearms, say, or on environmental regulation. If the principle is that local governments may decline to cooperate with federal law they find immoral, then that principle is available to everyone. It will not stay on one side of the aisle for long. Several states have in fact passed laws forbidding their own officers from helping to enforce certain federal gun rules, and the logic is the same logic.

Why uniformity is a conservative value

Now the constitutional part, which is about why this is not a technicality.

The rule of law, the idea that the same rule applies to the powerful and the weak, to the city and the citizen, is the foundation on which the rest of the Constitution rests. The Founders thought of it as the thing that distinguishes a republic from an aristocracy. If a law applies in one city and not in another, a citizen's rights and duties depend on his zip code. That is not a federal system. It is a patchwork of little sovereignties, which is exactly what the Constitution was written to replace.

The Constitution does give Congress, in Article I, Section 8, the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization." The adjective uniform is there for the same reason the Supremacy Clause is: to guarantee that the question of who may become a member of the American people is answered by the whole nation, through its Congress, and not by a patchwork of cities. The first Congresses took that charge literally, as One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws shows, and the later story of how the word "sanctuary" grew from a police order into a political brand is in How Sanctuary Became a Brand, From a 1979 Police Order to City Hall. When a city adopts its own immigration policy, the issue is not whether the policy is kind. The issue is whether a city may substitute its judgment for the judgment of the people's representatives on a question the Constitution assigns to the national legislature.

And there is a deeper point still. Federal law gets its legitimacy from the votes of citizens in every state. A city that says "we will treat this law as optional" is not only defying Washington. It is overriding the votes of the citizens in every other city who elected the members of Congress who passed it. That is what makes the sanctuary question a question about democracy as well as federalism.

Take the idea one step further

Let me finish where I started, with the satire, because I think it earns a final turn.

If Pleasantville's tax resolution strikes you as ridiculous, notice how it strikes you. It is not that the idea is unkind. It is not that the idea is unconstitutional, though it is. It is that you instinctively understand that the taxes we owe do not depend on whether our neighbors, our mayor or our city council approve of the tax code. A tax that is owed is owed. A law that is the law is the law.

The people who think the principle is silly when it is applied to unpaid taxes are the same people who understand, at once, why it is serious when it is applied to anything else that the whole nation has agreed to by vote. The only real question is whether you apply that understanding evenly.

And that is the lesson of the thought experiment: not that cities must do whatever Washington says, because they need not and the Tenth Amendment says so, but that selective cooperation is a principle with no natural stopping point. The mayor who declares a sanctuary from one federal law has handed the next mayor a template for another. Nobody who values a country that holds together should want that template in circulation.

The case in brief

1. The Pleasantville satire is invented, but its logic is real: a local government that declares itself exempt from federal law by resolution is claiming a power the Constitution denies.
2. The Supremacy Clause, Article VI, Clause 2, makes laws made "in Pursuance" of the Constitution "the supreme Law of the Land," state and local acts "to the Contrary notwithstanding."
3. The honest counterpoint is anti-commandeering (New York, Printz, Murphy): Washington may not conscript state and local officers, so declining to volunteer help is lawful while hiding people or blocking agents is not.
4. The principle of selective cooperation has no natural stopping point, and it is available to every state and city for every federal law, including the ones conservatives like.
5. Uniform law is a conservative value because the rule of law means the same rule for everyone, and because a city that treats a national law as optional overrides every other citizen's vote.

What you can do: read Article VI, Clause 2 and the Tenth Amendment side by side on the Constitution page, then check your own city's or county's policy on cooperating with federal immigration detainers and ask a council member at the next meeting to explain where it draws the line.