John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, has written Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) of the House Judiciary Committee urging them to oppose H.R. 5034, the Comprehensive Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness (CARE) Act.

The bill was introduced on June 15 by Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and has 136 cosponsors. As the letter (available here) argues, the bill seeks to override all Congressional authority over interstate commerce in alcohol regulation, taking “a far reaching step that would reverse long-established judicial precedent.”

Passage of the CARE ACT would allow discrimination against out-of-state producers of alcoholic beverages and balkanize the marketplace. States already have significant authority to regulate alcohol sales under their police powers. This legislation is unnecessary to protect a state’s citizens or preserve a state’s ownership of retail distribution. Its only purpose is to protect the economic interests of certain parts of the distribution network to the detriment of others. Further, H.R. 5034 contains no exceptions for key areas in which national uniformity are critical to our member companies like foreign importation, labeling standards and advertising.

We strongly believe passage of H.R. 5034 would be detrimental to alcohol manufacturing by unfairly discriminating against certain producers, imposing greater operational complexity, increasing costs and imposing duplicative and conflicting regulations that will negatively impact our brewing, distilling and vintner member companies and cost jobs.

Constitutional, regulatory and policy arguments aside, can we please, PLEASE, stop writing bill titles with the explicit purpose of creating a forced acronymn? The CARE Act? Acronymns are not arguments.