Page:James Dawson, et ux. v. Dale W. Steager, West Virginia State Tax Commissioner.pdf/7

Rh But the narrowness of a discriminatory state tax law has never been enough to render it necessarily lawful.

With its primary argument lost, the State now proceeds more modestly. Echoing the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, the State argues that we should uphold its statute because it isn’t intended to harm federal retirees, only to help certain state retirees. But under the terms of §111, the “State’s interest in adopting the discriminatory tax, no matter how substantial, is simply irrelevant.” Davis, 489 U. S., at 816. We can safely assume that discriminatory laws like West Virginia’s are almost always enacted with the purpose of benefiting state employees rather than harming their federal counterparts. Yet that wasn’t enough to save the state statutes in Davis, Barker, or Phillips, and it can’t be enough here. Under §111 what matters isn’t the intent lurking behind the law but whether the letter of the law “treat[s] those who deal with” the federal government “as well as it treats those with whom [the State] deals itself.” Phillips Chemical Co., 361 U. S., at 385.

If treatment rather than intent is what matters, the State suggests that it should still prevail for other reasons. Section 111 prohibits “discriminat[ion],” something we’ve often described as treating similarly situated persons differently. See Davis, 489 U. S., at 815–816; Phillips Chemical Co., 361 U. S., at 383. And before us West Virginia insists that even if retired U. S. Marshals and taxexempt state law enforcement retirees had similar job responsibilities, they aren’t “similarly situated” for other reasons. Put another way, the State contends that the difference in treatment its law commands doesn’t qualify as unlawful discrimination because it is “directly related to, and justified by,” a lawful and “significant difference” between the two classes. Davis, 489 U. S., at 816 (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted).

In approaching this argument, everyone before us