Presidential candidate Marco Rubio and three other GOP senators used the occasion of the busiest Web shopping day of the year—Cyber Monday—to urge non-passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2015 (MFA). An earlier version of the bill, which would have remote sellers like Internet retailers and catalogers collect the local sales taxes of purchasers, was passed by the Senate in 2013 but not acted upon by the House.
Florida Senator Rubio was joined by fellow Commerce Committee members Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Steve Daines (R-MT), along with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) in sending a letter decrying the bill as a “misguided and destructive Internet tax collection scheme” to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
“The bill could lead to Internet retailers in all states being forced to become tax collectors for nearly 10,000 tax jurisdictions across the country,” the senators wrote. “Only in Washington would such a proposal be labeled as the ‘Marketplace Fairness Act.'”
Opponents of the bill such as NetChoice, the Direct Marketing Association, and the American Catalog Mailers Association have waged a David versus Goliath battle against the National Retail Federation in its pursuit to side-track MFA. Though it remains alive on Capitol Hill, the bill-tracking service Govtrack currently gives it just a 1% chance of passing. The Senate Finance committee would make the determination on whether or not to move it forward, but it has yet to schedule a mark-up of the bill.
“We should be focused on policies that encourage economic growth and job creation, instead of imposing new financial burdens and onerous regulations on businesses and interstate commerce,” the senators wrote, adding that they would oppose any effort to tax and regulate small Internet businesses.
