DEFINITIONS: “Public Domain”
“The Constitution permits Congress to dispose of and to make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States. This power applies as well to territory belonging to the United States within the States, as beyond them. It comprehends all the public domain, wherever it may be. The argument is, that 510*510 the power to make “ALL needful rules and regulations” “is a power of legislation,” “a full legislative power;” “that it includes all subjects of legislation in the territory,” and is without any limitations, except the positive prohibitions which affect all the powers of Congress. Congress may then regulate or prohibit slavery upon the public domain within the new States, and such a prohibition would permanently affect the capacity of a slave, whose master might carry him to it. And why not? Because no power has been conferred on Congress. This is a conclusion universally admitted. But the power to “make rules and regulations respecting the territory” is not restrained by State lines, nor are there any constitutional prohibitions upon its exercise in the domain of the United States within the States; and whatever rules and regulations respecting territory Congress may constitutionally make are supreme, and are not dependent on the situs of “the territory.”””
[Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857);
SOURCE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3231372247892780026
[EDITORIAL: Note the use of the phrase “PUBLIC DOMAIN” to describe the collection of “ALL property” owned by the government. This is VERY similar to the language in the current tax code, which uses “DOMESTIC” instead of “PUBLIC DOMAIN”. This lawsuit happened only 4 years before the Civil War started, and the subject of it was control over slaves, which at the time were regarded as property. Congress sought to control this property extraterritorially within the exclusive jurisdiction of states of the Union. This subject is very relevant to taxation, because “taxpayers” are just a modern day fiction that approximates what a slave was back then. They too are treated as PROPERTY.]