A leading case in constitutional law it ain’t. But we now have a ruling: The Snuggie—”The Blanket That Has Sleeves!”—is indeed a blanket, the sleeves notwithstanding. So says Judge Mark A. Barnett of the United States Court of International Trade. And rightly so, as far as The Scrapbook can tell.
How did the Snuggie—that comical “as seen on TV” accessory for couch potatoes who want their hands free to drink beer and eat chips while otherwise swaddled on the sofa in polyester fleece—get to be an object of such gravity to warrant the judgment of a federal court?
It all has to do with the sort of differential in taxation that makes for full employment for Washington lobbyists. In this case, it is the fact that imported blankets are hit with an 8.5 percent tariff, whereas, under subsection 6114, “garments, knitted or crocheted,” brought into the country require the payment of 14.9 percent duties. The Snuggies people have been bringing their product into the United States as “blankets,” thus enjoying the lower “blanket” tariff. The clever fellows at Customs and Border Protection were not fooled. No one can pull the polyester fleece over their eyes. They demanded that Snuggies be treated as garments, what with the sleeves and all.
The dispute ended up in court, with Allstar Marketing Group squaring off against no less than the United States itself.
Which is where the Department of Justice came in. The geniuses there argued on behalf of Customs that the Snuggie was the same as “clerical or ecclesiastical garments and vestments” (which may be true if one worships at the altar of junk-food). And if the court wasn’t buying that, Justice maintained that the Snuggie was akin to “professional or scholastic gowns and robes,” garments that “have wide-armed sleeves and flow loosely around the body.”
Needless to say, the United States lost. Have the lawyers for the Justice Department never been in court before? If they had, they might have noticed that judges wear robes. The Scrapbook suspects those judges are not inclined to have their workwear equated with Snuggies.
Case closed.
