CRA Files Reply Brief In U.S. Court of Appeals
On Monday, April 15th, Cigar Rights of America (CRA), filed the industry’s reply brief in response to the United States Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) appeal in Cigar Association of America, Cigar…
The Imperative of Tax Caps for Premium Cigars
When it comes to state taxation policies, few industries face as much scrutiny and inconsistency as premium cigars. As lawmakers grapple with budgetary constraints and revenue generation, the cigar industry…
Vermont’s Senate Bill 18: Premium Cigars and the Flavored Tobacco Debate
On January 18, 2023, Vermont State Senator Virginia Lyons proposed Senate Bill 18 (S.18) which would eliminate flavored tobacco products in the state. The bill’s preamble highlighted the detrimental effects…
Celebrating Baseball’s Timeless Bond with Cigars
Baseball and cigars have woven a unique tapestry in American culture, symbolizing not only a bond of tradition and camaraderie but also celebrated collective memory and individual leisure. With the…
Cigar News
Washington, DC: CRA monitors federal policies across the tobacco regulation space as part of our efforts to protect premium cigars. This monitoring is critical to understanding the larger trends and perspectives at the FDA as they emerge and evolve. While this article on FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf's efforts to lobby the White House regarding the long-delayed menthol ban does not directly address CRA's regulatory concerns surrounding premium cigars, as defined by Judge Amit Mehta (see footnote 7), it is a critical example of how important it is to understand FDA's approaches to their other regulatory efforts as analogs to inform how they are likely to engage premium cigars at the end of their current appeal-process in federal court.
As part of this strategic process, we filed a comment with the FDA on August 3, 2023, regarding their recent proposed flavored tobacco product policy. While CRA does not take a position on flavor and menthol bans generally, we do engage on such policies to advocate for premium cigars to be exempted, to avoid inadvertent overregulation, and we expect to do the same when the menthol ban is proposed in the Federal Register. While premium cigars are currently unregulated by the FDA, we must continue these efforts to insulate premium cigars from the FDA's future efforts to re-regulate us, something they have repeatedly signaled they intend to pursue at the end of the current appeals process.
Washington, DC: In this article by Bloomberg's Suzanne Monyak, a significant but underappreciated side-effect of the pending SCOTUS decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is raised: Agencies' being deluged with lawsuits addressing their regulations. As discussed in this prior article by CRA's Cody Carden Loper Bright, a case about Chevron deference could drastically alter the courts' capacity to second-guess agency rulemaking. This will likely drive massive numbers of plaintiffs into court, challenging a rule-making process that, to this point, has been highly deferential to Agencies over the past 40 years. This is significant for CRA not only because we would be able to force the FDA to be more diligent in their rule-making, but also because the increased work-load on net would make the need for them to prioritize the most pressing issues all the more, and, as recommended by the Reagan-Udall Foundation, deprioritize premium cigar regulation, an issue which has not only consumed a disproportionate amount of their time, money, and which, even with the high level of deference granted to them under Chevron, has led to losses in federal court.
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