The Supreme Court is apparently bound and determined to leave its most controversial cases until the very last week of the term. That would be next Thursday, when we'll finally get rulings on Trump's immunity, Chevron deference, and more.
This week all we got was a boring tax case that no one cares much about. It revolves around the esoteric question of whether Congress can tax overseas profits even if those profits have been reinvested in the company. The only interesting thing about this is that taxing unrealized profits is kinda sorta like a wealth tax. If the court overturned this provision, it might mean they'd overturn a wealth tax too.
But they didn't:
The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and the court’s three liberals. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
All of the liberals and most of the conservatives agreed to uphold the tax. I'm not sure this really means all that much, but to the extent it does it's a win for liberals and continues the Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think (or hoped).
State and local governments tax wealth all the time (property taxes).
Creigh Gordon - I do not believe there is a likely legal limit for a state to create a wealth tax: rather, it remains an open issue, if a Federal wealth tax is legal...
A state, of course, risks wealthy people moving...
Investopedia even says that a property tax is a form of excise tax paid directly by consumers, and excises are a specifically enumerated authority of Congress. And the feds also tax wealth or property already, like retirement accounts that aren't drawn down as required, by assessing penalties.
I've seen snippets of this opinion that stress how the plaintiffs were looking for a special exception for one very specific type of property that in general is already widely taxed, and saying that if they got their way, huge areas of tax law would have to be rewritten.
So SCOTUS has taken a pass on blowing up settled law on very narrow or doubtful claims twice now, here and with mifepristone. Whether it's a full-session trend or just inoculation before a major outrage next week is the question.
I can't agree with KD that it's a sign of moderation, though. Maybe of minor chastening, depending what happens next week.
Yes, the constitution reserved wealth taxes for the states. Income and tariffs were the taxes for the feds. (Note the 16th amendment did not make a federal income tax legal, ordinary income tax had always been legal, it just permitted it on dividends and capital gains which the supreme court (irrationally for the dividend tax) declared to be wealth taxes.
Read the decision and the court majority said the decision making the 16th amendment necessary for income tax on dividends and capital gains was wrongly decided and the 16th amendment is redundant.Contrary to Kevin, that's a pretty big decision.
It certainly is a sweeping affirmation of Congress's authority to tax all kinds of income, whether realized or not, and no matter where in the world it's derived (and as memyselfandi kind of says, it preserves a real sweetheart deal people got from that part of the law). If Barrett was editing these, though, I think she'd give the main opinion no better than revise and resubmit.
I really wish I could collect for every time Kavanaugh used some variant of "precedent." Why ever would that word matter so much to them? /s
Will the immunity ruling overshadow coverage of the debates, or will the debates overshadow the ruling?
The rulings will most likely set the topics of the debate. They will come out In the morning, with the debate at 9pm ET. I expect that Biden will spend that afternoon developing his responses. The material (this is what you get from republicans) could be rich.
"and continues the Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think (or hoped)."
They only exhibit this in cases that as you say, nobody really cares about or are somewhat minor in impact.
When it comes to the truly horrendously impacting stuff, the reason they were put there to begin with, they have zero problem ignoring precedent, or essentially rewriting laws out of thin air even if they need to rely on the writings of a literal witch hunter from centuries ago to justify their partisan madness.
It would have destroyed a favorite conservative tax, Which is why it survived.
It is ludicrous that it has taken this long to rule on Trump's absolute immunity claim which SCOTUS shouldn't have taken up in the first place. I can already see that at least Thomas and Alito will opine that the specific crimes that Trump is alleged to have committed are fully covered by presidential immunity. I wouldn't be totally surprised if Gorsuch, Kavenaugh, and Coney-Barrett concurred. The "rule of law" only applies to the poor and powerless.
Your correct in saying the Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think continues as evidenced by the knowledge that a conservative is skeptical of and reticent to change. The difference between "conservative" and the six justices who don't seem to have any reticence about turning the country into a single-party authoritarian autocracy is the same as the difference between up and down.
I have to get my licks in before the 2025 version of Big Brother imposes Newspeak laws.
" Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think (or hoped)."
lol
Drum still has not learned that Roberts is a political animal and operates his court accordingly
“The Supreme Court is apparently bound and determined to leave its most controversial cases until the very last week of the term. That would be next Thursday, when we'll finally get rulings on Trump's immunity, Chevron deference, and more.”
“All of the liberals and most of the conservatives agreed to uphold the tax. I'm not sure this really means all that much, but to the extent it does it's a win for liberals and continues the Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think (or hoped).”
These two things couldn’t possibly be related, right? Is this a case of a tongue so firmly in cheek that the meaning becomes inscrutable?
Without looking at the Constitutional text on it, which I guess frowns on property tax, I think the very legitimate -- not that the current incarnation of the Supreme Court would recognize it as such -- way to tax wealth is to recognize imputed rent income.
Really, the value of a property should be based on its most productive use: if you own vast acres of prime farm land but choose to use it instead as your personal and private golf course, the value of the property is still based upon its potential use as prime farm land.
America perversely recognizes property rights as being equal to -- or often superior to -- human rights. This is really sick.
Basically, our social contract requires that everyone respect property rights ... whether they themselves own property or not.
But what do people without property get in exchange for recognizing other people's property rights, to their own detriment?
In America, they get nothing at all ... unless you count avoiding criminal prosecution as a benefit.
It would be infinitely more equitable -- easy to get to "infinitely more" when you start from zero -- to formalize recognizing property rights as part of the social contract ... and then you can have things like access to healthcare as the "quid" for the "quo" of respecting property rights.
Call access to healthcare "a right" if you want to ... but I don't think it is such a thing. But neither do I think property "rights" are rights.
Basic rights are things we recognize as existing independent of human interpretation. They don't, of course, exist independent of human interpretation, but that is how we recognize them, or at least how we should recognize them.
Property "rights" don't exist outside of human interpretation, and neither does a "right" to healthcare ... unless you want to hold that a physician can be forced to provide healthcare to someone basically at any time.
But they can be implemented as contractual rights, possibly as part of an implied contract: you respect other people's property rights and pay your taxes, and you are entitle to access to healthcare.
We, of course, don't do that.
But we should.