[Source: Reuters]

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that a 156-year-old ban on at-home distilling is unconstitutional, siding with a group that advocates for legalizing the ability of people to produce spirits like whiskey and bourbon for their personal consumption.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump in Fort Worth, on Wednesday agreed with, opens new tab the Hobby Distillers Association’s lawyers that the longstanding ban exceeded Congress’s taxing power and ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

He issued a permanent injunction barring the ban from being enforced against the Hobby Distillers Association’s members but stayed his decision for 14 days so the government could seek a stay at the appellate court level.

Devin Watkins, a lawyer for the Texas-based hobby group at the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in an email the ruling “respects the rights of our clients to live under a government of limited powers.”

The U.S. Department of Justice, which defended the law, did not respond to a request for comment.

The hobby group, along with four of its 1,300 members, sued agencies tasked with enforcing the ban in December, arguing the government’s regulatory reach could not extend to activities conducted within their homes.

They filed their lawsuit against agencies including the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), a division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that regulates and collects taxes on alcohol, and the Justice Department, which can prosecute felony violations.

Pittman said that while three of the individual plaintiffs had failed to establish that they faced a credible threat of being prosecuted without an injunction, the group and one of its members had carried their burden of establishing they would be harmed if the ban was enforced.

That member, Scott McNutt, received an unsolicited letter from the TTB notifying him he faced potential civil and criminal liability after it came to its attention that he may have purchased materials that could be used to distill spirits.

The Justice Department argued the ban was a valid measure designed by Congress to protect the substantial revenue the government raises from taxing distilled spirits by limiting where plants could be located.

But Pittman said the ban, which is incorporated into two separate statutes, was not a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power as it did not raise revenue and “did nothing more than statutorily ferment a crime.”

“While prohibiting the possession of an at-home still meant to distill beverage alcohol might be convenient to protect tax revenue on spirits, it is not a sufficiently clear corollary to the positive power of laying and collecting taxes,” he wrote.

He said the ban on producing spirits at home likewise could not be sustained under Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce, saying it did not further a comprehensive interstate market regulation given that there were “many aspects of the alcohol industry that Congress has left untouched.”

The case is Hobby Distillers Association v. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, No. 4:23-cv-01221.

For Hobby Distillers Association: Devin Watkins of Competitive Enterprise Institute and Casey Griffith of Griffith Barbee
For the government: Elizabeth Tulis, Hannah Solomon-Strauss and Anna Deffebach of the U.S. Department of Justice