The Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Texas Thursday seeking to block the Treasury Department’s April 2016 inversion regulations. The Chamber says that the inversion regulations exceed Treasury’s statutory jurisdiction, that the regulations are arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and that Treasury failed to follow the APA’s notice-and-comment requirements. The last of these arguments isn’t frivolous: Treasury certainly could have done more to explain why it was implementing the new rules immediately rather than first allowing 30 days for comment. But whatever one thinks of the Chamber’s notice-and-comment argument, it shouldn’t matter: the Chamber’s complaint has a fatal flaw.

The problem for the Chamber is the pesky Tax Anti-Injunction Act (TAIA), 26 U.S.C. § 7421, which reads (in relevant part):

[N]o suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person, whether or not such person is the person against whom such tax was assessed.

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