There is probably a special place for decisions which weren't even wrong, but where the Court's reasoning was extremely malicious: the Warren Court tended to uphold good policy using the Commerce Clause in an attempt to underline that legislative power under the Commerce Clause was effectively unlimited, but it's hard to cite those cases since terrible policy has been upheld under the Commerce Clause as well. But Griswold v. Connecticut, a case where the majority opinion goes out of its way to say that the Court can make whatever determinations it wants regardless of the Constitution, has reasoning that's especially noxious, especially given that it would have been extremely easy to say there is a right to privacy or bodily autonomy in the plain language of the Fourth Amendment rather than reaching for penumbras.
didn't strike down all income taxes, only those such as taxes on rental income that it deemed to be direct taxes.
First, the core holding of
Flint. that a tax on corporations for the benefits of being a corporation is by default an excise, is sound enough.
The question therefore is whether net income is a reasonable measure to use for the benefits of being a corporation. Since any income that might be subject to the corporation tax could have avoided taxation by not using a corporate structure, unless the income in question was increased by using a corporate structure, there would be every incentive to not use a corporation and thus avoid the tax. The very fact that the tax is not incurred by the mere existence and use of the actual property generating the income is enough to not make it a direct tax under case law prior to
Flint.
In short,
Flint essentially holds that corporations are not property, but a means of holding property, and that while taxes on property (or the revenues thereof) constitute a direct tax, taxes on a means of holding property (or collecting the revenues thereof) do not.
