## Facts

- Oregon amended its constitution to permit lawmaking by initiative and referendum while also retaining a bicameral legislative assembly.
- In 1906, Oregon voters adopted by initiative a statute imposing a 2% gross-receipts tax on telephone and telegraph companies.
- Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Company was assessed under the initiative-adopted tax, paid under protest, and sued to invalidate the assessment.
- The company argued that Oregon’s initiative and referendum system rendered the state government nonrepublican under Article IV, § 4, and that enforcement of the tax therefore violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
- The Oregon Supreme Court upheld the tax, and the company sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court by writ of error.

## Issues

1. Whether a claim that a state’s initiative and referendum system makes its government nonrepublican under Article IV, § 4 presents a justiciable question for federal courts.
2. Whether a state tax law can be invalidated in court on the theory that it was enacted through state constitutional procedures alleged to violate the Guarantee Clause.
3. Whether a due process challenge to a tax is justiciable when it rests solely on an asserted Guarantee Clause violation.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court dismissed the writ of error for want of jurisdiction.
- The Court held that enforcement of the Guarantee Clause is committed to Congress and presents a political question beyond judicial power.
- The Court ruled that a statute otherwise within a state’s power cannot be attacked in court on the ground that it was adopted through procedures alleged to render the state government unrepublican.
- The Court rejected the attempt to recast the Guarantee Clause argument as a Fourteenth Amendment due process claim because the alleged due process deprivation depended entirely on the nonrepublican-form theory.

## Legal Principles

- Claims seeking judicial enforcement of the Article IV, § 4 guarantee of a “Republican Form of Government” are nonjusticiable political questions reserved to Congress.
- Courts lack jurisdiction to determine whether a state’s governmental structure is “republican” within the meaning of the Guarantee Clause.
- A litigant cannot obtain judicial review of a Guarantee Clause challenge by attaching it to a due process theory when the asserted due process violation is derivative of the Guarantee Clause claim rather than an independent defect in the law or state taxing power.

## Conclusion

The Court dismissed the case because the challenge to Oregon’s initiative-and-referendum system, and the resulting attack on the tax, raised a Guarantee Clause political question committed to Congress and therefore outside federal judicial jurisdiction.


Pac. States Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Oregon, 223 U.S. 118 (1912)