Cato’s third Supreme Court brief in the Obamacare litigation concerns the issue of whether the federal tax Anti-Injunction Act prevents federal courts from timely reviewing Congress’s most egregious attempt to exceed its power to regulate interstate commerce. The AIA bars courts from enjoining “any tax” before that tax is assessed or collected.

One would think that such a law would have no application to the penalty that enforces the individual health insurance mandate, which is not a tax but rather a punishment for not complying with the mandate. Accordingly, most of the courts to consider the issue have found the AIA to be inapplicable to individual mandate challenges. Moreover, the government itself has long conceded that the AIA does not bar these suits.

A Fourth Circuit majority and the dissenting Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the D.C. Circuit, however, reached a contrary conclusion, reasoning that the AIA applies to all exactions assessed under the Internal Revenue Code, including “penalties.” Out of an abundance of caution, and because the AIA may be a jurisdictional bar, the Supreme Court appointed an amicus curiae to argue for the position that the AIA bars these suits.

The plaintiffs here — the 26 states, the National Federation of Independent Business, and several individuals — have advanced several strong arguments for why the AIA doesn’t apply. Cato’s brief expands on one of those arguments: that the words “any tax” in the AIA do not include “penalties” simply because they may be codified in the Code.

First, we demonstrate that the Supreme Court has always held that “taxes” and “penalties” are not interchangeable for AIA purposes. Second, we show that, with one exception, all of the cases cited in the amicus briefs filed by two former IRS commissioners, Mortimer Caplin and Sheldon Cohen — which appear to have heavily influenced the Fourth Circuit and Judge Kavanaugh — concerned penalties that were statutorily defined as taxes. This refutes the commissioners’ erroneous claim that those cases concerned penalties that were not defined as taxes. As we say in our brief, “the influence of Amici Caplin & Cohen’s [D.C. Circuit] brief is surpassed only by its misdirection.” The one exception is the Mobile Republican case (Eleventh Circuit 2003), which we explain is properly understood as applying the AIA to penalties that enforce substantive tax provisions.

In short, the AIA cannot bar suits to enjoin the individual mandate penalty because that penalty neither is defined as a tax nor enforces a substantive tax provision.

Thanks very much to Cato legal associate Chaim Gordon for taking the lead in drafting this brief and helping me with this blogpost.

Obamacare Challenge Not Barred By a Weird Technicality is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of our oldest laws, the Alien Tort Statute (1789), grants federal courts jurisdiction over lawsuits brought by aliens for actions “in violation of the law of nations.” Courts have differed in their method of interpreting this “law of nations” — an old way of saying “international law” – and thus in their decisions on what behavior violates it and the types of defendants who may be liable. Recent ATS litigation has thus ignited a debate over the role of judges in applying international law.

Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum presents the question of whether, under the ATS, the law of nations can be applied against an entity that is not a natural person: a corporation. In this case, 12 Nigerians sued Royal Dutch and its Shell subsidiaries, alleging that Nigerian soldiers committed human rights abuses on the companies’ behalf between 1992 and 1995, purportedly in response to demonstrations against oil exploration.

The district court dismissed most of the claims but let certain others proceed. The Second Circuit dismissed the case entirely, holding that the ATS’s jurisdictional grant does not extend to cases against corporations, which are not liable for crimes under the law of nations. The Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

Cato has now filed a brief arguing that the ATS must be interpreted in a manner consistent with Congress’s original jurisdictional grant. This interpretation, supporting the Second Circuit’s ruling, maintains the Constitution’s separation of powers — which gives Congress the power to determine the scope of federal courts’ jurisdiction. Allowing courts to expand their jurisdiction without Congress’s consent would create a “democracy gap” that would be particularly serious here, where the case involves issues of foreign affairs that are appropriately the province of the political branches.

The Supreme Court made clear in Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S.A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc. (1999) that evolving methods of interpreting international law do not inform the ATS’s jurisdictional reach, which has not changed since 1789. Nonetheless, lower courts are split on whether corporations may be liable for the sorts of violations at issue here, largely due to their varied interpretive methods.

In our brief, we urge the Court to clarify the proper method of interpreting the law of nations under the ATS. We argue that Judge José Cabranes, a leading international law jurist (and Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s mentor) who authored the Second Circuit’s Kiobel decision, set out the correct interpretive method in an earlier case, Flores v. Southern Peru Copper Corp. (2003). Judge Cabranes’s reasoning in Flores embodied both the guidance that the Supreme Court would give in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (2004) and the teachings of classical theorists like Grotius, by defining customary international law as “composed only of those rules that States [countries] universally abide by, or accede to, out of a sense of legal obligation and mutual concern.”

Judge Cabranes used as relevant evidence the States’ formal lawmaking actions, such as international conventions that “establish[] rules expressly recognized by the contesting states” and international custom where the States adhere “out of a sense of legal obligation.” He further acknowledged that the method used in 1789 to interpret what comprised the law of nations defined both the claims and the parties cognizable under international law. By looking to the proper sources, Judge Cabranes correctly concluded that corporations cannot be held liable for violations of international law for ATS purposes, and in so doing recognized the constitutional checks that prevent courts from expanding their own jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum on February 28.

Thanks to legal associate Anastasia Killian for her help with this blogpost.

The ‘Law of Nations’ Is What It Was in 1789 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If the First Amendment means anything, then school officials cannot prohibit students from handing out gifts with Christmas messages due to the religious content of those messages. Nonetheless, the Fifth Circuit held en banc that student speech rights are not “clearly established,” and that, therefore, two Plano, Texas officials could invoke qualified immunity to shield themselves from liability for doing so.

Yesterday Cato filed an amicus brief supporting the students’ request that the Supreme Court hear their case—our third brief in this long-running saga. We argue that educators have fair warning that viewpoint-based discrimination against student speech violates the First Amendment and thus may not invoke qualified immunity.

While the Fifth Circuit held that a constitutional right must have previously been defined with a “high degree of particularity” in a case that is “specific[ally] and factually analogous” to be clearly established, the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that neither “fundamentally similar” nor “materially similar” cases are required and that general statements of law can give fair warning. Indeed, if the Fifth Circuit’s qualified-immunity standard is upheld, it will be so difficult to establish fair warning for unconstitutional actions that qualified immunity will cease to be “qualified.”

Student speech rights were clearly established by the foundational student-rights case of Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), wherein the Court held that student speech cannot be suppressed unless the speech will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school,” subject to limited exceptions. Such exceptions include lewd or vulgar speech, or speech that may reasonably be viewed as advocating unlawful drug use. Certainly the student speech at issue here, which included Christmas greetings written on candy canes, and pencils and other small gifts with messages like “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” does not fall under those exceptions.

We further argue that the same standard for determining whether a law is clearly established should determine whether a court can look to nonbinding precedent; if Supreme Court and relevant-circuit precedent is on point, courts should not look to authority from other jurisdictions. These standards maintain the proper balance between providing officials with fair notice of behavior that could result in civil liability and ensuring that individuals have legal recourse when their rights are violated.

The Supreme Court will decide later this winter whether to take the case, Morgan v. Swanson, and hear argument in the fall.

Thanks to Cato legal associate Anastasia Killian for her help with this post, and with our brief.

The First Amendment Protects Students’ Rights to Speak on Religious Subjects is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Two weeks ago I wrote about the emergency appeal of Texas’s new redistricting maps that reached the Supreme Court last month and was argued early last week.  The state argued that the interim maps a three-judge district court in San Antonio drew didn’t defer sufficiently to the maps passed by the Texas legislature (which could not go into direct effect because they hadn’t been approved by either the Justice Department or a three-judge D.C. district court, per the requirements of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act).  A group of challengers, meanwhile, claimed that Texas’s  maps discriminated against and diluted the voting strength of minorities in violation of the VRA’s Section 2.  Cato’s brief supported neither side but urged the Court to reconsider the constitutionality of the modern VRA altogether, not least because Sections 2 and 5 conflict with each other and with the Constitution.

Today, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the San Antonio court’s maps because that court may not have used the “appropriate standards” in drawing its interim maps.  In a tight 11-page opinion, the Court made clear that, regardless of the legal ambiguities and other challenges the lower court faced, it still had to use the Texas legislature’s maps as a starting point and only deviate from them on districts where the Section 2 plaintiffs had a “likelihood of success on the merits” of their claims or where there was a “reasonable probability” of failing to get Section 5 approval.  Here’s the nut of the Court’s decision:

To the extent the District Court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of “the collective public good” for the Texas Legislature’s determination of which policies serve “the interests of the citizens of Texas,” the court erred.

That legal ruling is almost certainly correct — and in any event provides much-needed guidance for future such difficult situations — but may not change the ultimate result all that much because the district court most erred in explaining how it did it what it did rather than in doing it.  It even deferred significantly to the Texas maps after saying that it owed them no deference!

Unfortunately, the perfect storm that landed this case in the Supreme Court’s lap — no Section 5 “preclearance,” potentially viable Section 2 challenges, the need to have maps finalized quickly for the timely administration of primaries, the undesirability of having courts draw maps and the lack of clear rules of doing so — is not unique.  Justice Thomas is thus onto something when he reiterated today, in his separate concurrence, his long-held position that Section 5 is unconstitutional. 

But the problem is bigger than that: the Voting Rights Act as a whole has served its purpose but is now outmoded and unworkable — and consequently unconstitutional.  Section 2 requires race-based districting, even as Section 5, along with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, seem to prohibit it.  For its part, Section 5 arbitrarily prevents common national redistricting standards.   These tensions cannot but produce chaotic proceedings like those here, which are replicated every redistricting cycle.   This state of affairs only serves to frustrate state legislatures, the judicial branch, and the voting public.

Put simply, the VRA’s success has undermined its continuing viability; courts and legislatures struggle mightily and often fruitlessly to satisfy both the VRA’s race-based mandate and the Fifteenth Amendment’s equal treatment guarantee.  Section 5′s selective applicability precludes the establishment of nationwide districting standards, confounding lower courts and producing different, often contradictory, treatment of voting rights in different states – in large part because Sections 2 and 5 themselves conflict with each other.

These difficulties – constitutional, statutory, and practical — disadvantage candidates, voters, legislatures, and courts, and undermine the VRA’s great legacy of vindicating the voting rights of all citizens.  While Perry v Perez may not have been the right vehicle for doing so because of exigencies involved in election administration, the Court should reconsider the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act as presently conceived at the next available opportunity.

Supreme Court Rejects Texas Redistricting Maps, Showing That Modern Voting Rights Act Is Outmoded and Unworkable is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today Cato filed its second Supreme Court amicus brief in the Obamacare litigation, on the issue of whether the health care law’s Medicaid expansion is a proper exercise of the Constitution’s Spending Clause.

That is, states must now accept a comprehensive reorganization of Medicaid or forfeit all federal Medicaid funding—even though the spending power is circumscribed to preserve a distinction between what is local and what is national. If Congress is allowed to attach conditions to spending that the states cannot refuse in order to achieve an objective it could not outright mandate, the local/national distinction that is so central to federalism will be erased.

Joining the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, Pacific Legal Foundation, Rep. Denny Rehberg (chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies), and Kansas Lt. Gov. Jeffrey Colyer (also a practicing physician) we argue that, in requiring states to accept onerous conditions on federal funds that it could not impose directly, the government has exceeded its enumerated powers and violated basic principles of federalism.

California is at risk of losing $25.6 billion in annual federal funding, for example, and together the states stand to lose more than a quarter trillion dollars annually. On average, states would have to increase their general revenue budgets by almost 40% in order to maintain their current level of Medicaid funding.

The 1987 case of South Dakota v. Dole, however, prohibits such a coercive use of the spending power and recognizes that “in some circumstances the financial inducement offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which ‘pressure turns into compulsion.’” Indeed, the states’ obligations, should they “choose” to accept federal funding and thus commit themselves to doing the government’s bidding, are far more substantial than those the Supreme Court invalidated in New York v. United States and Printz v. United States (which prohibit federal “commandeering” of state officials).

Moreover, the Congress that enacted the original Social Security Act, to which Medicare and Medicaid were added in the 1960s, recognized that social safety has always been the prerogative of the states and should continue to be done under state discretion. Medicaid itself was narrowly tailored to serve particularly needy groups.

In short, if Obamacare does not cross the line from valid “inducement” to unconstitutional “coercion,” nothing ever will. Just as the Commerce Clause is not an open-ended grant of power, the Spending Clause too has limits that must be enforced.

Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion Violates Federalism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Obamacare litigation has arrived on the big stage: the Supreme Court. The first opportunity for those opposing the legislation to weigh in comes on the issue that will be the last one the Court considers, “severability.” That is, if the individual mandate is struck down as unconstitutional, what (if any) of the rest of the law must fall with it?

On one hand, even in the absence of a severability clause, the Court should avoid striking down an entire law when only one small part is declared unconstitutional, particularly if the remainder of the law is unrelated to the defective bit (imagine an omnibus spending bill). On the other, the Court cannot go provision-by-provision and execute some sort of judicial line-item veto (creating a new law completely unrecognizable from what Congress enacted).

Many think that the rules in this area are unclear, but the analysis boils down to two questions:

1. Can the remainder “fully operate as law”?
2. Would Congress have passed the remainder?

In our brief, joined by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and co-authored by Prof. Richard Epstein, we examine these questions with a focus on Titles I and II of the law, which contain all the key provisions relating to Obamacare’s fundamental transformation of the national health care system: the requirement that insurers cover people with preexisting conditions (“guaranteed issue”), the requirement that premiums be assessed by a “community rating” formula, the creation of state insurance exchanges, Medicaid expansion, premium supports, etc.

Put simply, knocking out the individual mandate renders this whole package inoperable; the brave new health care world would not work as a matter of basic economic principle. As policy experiments in various states have proven, without an individual mandate, guaranteed-issue and community-rating provisions foster a “death spiral” because healthy people wait until they get sick or injured before buying under-priced insurance that they cannot then be refused, causing premiums to increase and costs to explode. The individual mandate is thus so interwoven with other crucial provisions that it cannot be excised without destroying the entire Obamacare structure.

Appreciating this mechanism, the government has conceded that guaranteed-issue and community-rating are indeed inextricably tied to the individual mandate—it has to, given its constitutional claim that the mandate is a necessary means of implementing a lawful regulation of interstate commerce. But a close analysis of the law reveals that the interoperability goes much further. And Congress knew this; there is no way it would have otherwise passed this law.

Thus, to aid the plaintiffs’ arguments regarding broader non-severability, our brief shows that the individual mandate is so central to the overall legislation that if it falls, those key Titles I and II must go with it.

The Court will consider the severability question for 90 minutes on March 28, the last of the three consecutive days it hears oral argument in the Obamacare cases.

Obamacare at the Supreme Court: Can the Individual Mandate Be Severed? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over the past decade, more than a dozen states have forced independent contractors who are paid through Medicaid to join public-sector unions.In 2003, Illinois unionized home healthcare workers and imbued the Service Employees International Union with the right to collect compulsory fees from the workers’ paychecks. Democracy is thus being turned on its head: the elected representatives for the people of Illinois have chosen a sub-representative for some of the people and given that sub-representative a taxing power.

In so doing, they have severely impaired home healthcare workers’ First Amendment right of association and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Without limits on government’s ability to forcibly unionize people who indirectly receive government-funded compensation (an increasingly large group), more and more citizens will have to interact with their representatives through a government-designated intermediary (a union); our democracy will become even more dominated by special interests than it is now.

Cato, joined by the National Federation of Independent Business and the Mackinac Center, filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to address this issue and vindicate the First Amendment freedoms upon which a thriving democracy depends. We argue that the forcible unionization of home healthcare workers serves none of the compelling purposes for public-sector unionization that have been articulated by the Supreme Court.

Because the Court has long recognized that unionization impinges certain constitutional rights, it has limited public-sector collective bargaining to those situations which advance the aims of promoting “labor peace” and eliminating “free riders.” Labor peace is promoted by limiting competing workplace interests from bargaining over the conditions of employment — for example, two unions at the same workplace representing different colleagues. Free riders are non-union employees who enjoy the benefits of union-achieved gains without paying into the union’s war chest. But neither aim is promoted by a system, such as Illinois’s, in which employees work in different locations and in which the customer — the disabled person paying the homecare worker through a Medicaid disbursal—still controls every crucial aspect of the employment relationship, including hiring and firing.

This last fact is most telling: the Illinois law only allows collective bargaining for higher wages and more generous benefits. That is, the law is only about speech — petitioning the government for higher wages and benefits — and does not address workplace conditions at all.

As more and more states push to unionize more workers who indirectly receive government money — campaigns that, in face o dwindling private-sector union membership, have been called “labor’s biggest victory in over sixty years” — it is vital that the Supreme Court articulate a limiting principle on this practice. Otherwise, more and more of us will be forced to interact with our representatives only through government-appointed bodies.

Against Forced Unionization of Independent Workers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The federal Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful “[t]o refuse to sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer . . . or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.”  Magner v. Gallagher addresses the question of whether the FHA’s ban on racial discrimination can be violated by someone who does not actually engage in racial discrimination:  Owners of rental properties in St. Paul, Minnesota brought this suit claiming that the city’s enforcement of its housing code — ensuring that rental units were safe and otherwise habitable — violated the FHA because the repairs and maintenance necessary to comply with the code would increase rents and price out many of their African-American tenants.

Unable to show that the housing code intentionally discriminated based on race, however, the owners argued — and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals accepted — a “disparate impact” theory under which a plaintiff need only show that an otherwise neutral practice has a disproportionate effect on some racial group. Cato has now joined the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Center for Equal Opportunity, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute on an amicus brief supporting the city’s request for Supreme Court review and arguing that the statutory language and congressional intent of the FHA preclude disparate impact claims.

We argue that extending such claims to the FHA “would deeply intrude on the authority of state and local governments, and render much of their housing policies illegal,” and “would inappropriately alter the federal-state balance in far-reaching ways.” Indeed, disparate impact claims would preclude all institutions subject to the FHA — public and private — from implementing many practical policies. For example, “because [the FHA] applies to financial institutions, banks and mortgage companies would be pressured to provide loans to unqualified applicants in order to avoid disparate impact liability. Similar actions played a key role in triggering the mortgage crisis of 2007-2008.”

Moreover, the disparate impact doctrine directly conflicts with the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantees by forcing government agencies “to engage in unconstitutional race-conscious decision making” in order to avoid liability under the Act. In short, allowing disparate impact claims under the FHA would both lead to adverse economic consequences and create new constitutional tensions.

The Supreme Court will hear Magner v. Gallagher on Feb. 29.

Enforcing Housing Codes Is Not Racist is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The decennial redrawing of electoral districts consistently produces extensive litigation. The most notable cases this cycle come, as they often have, from Texas.

A number of activist groups challenged the Texas legislature’s maps for state house, state senate, and congressional districts, alleging racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a special three-judge federal district court in San Antonio. At the same time, Texas is seeking in another three-judge district court in D.C. the “preclearance” of its maps that it needs to implement them under the VRA’s Section 5.

Enacted in 1965 to combat pervasive discrimination against black voters in the South, the VRA has exceeded expectations in excising that shameful phenomenon. Its application now, however, stymies the orderly implementation of free and fair elections, particularly in jurisdictions subject not only to the general prohibition on race-based voter discrimination, but also the Section 5 preclearance requirement.

Originally conceived as a check on states where discrimination was prevalent in the 1960s, preclearance requires certain jurisdictions to obtain federal approval before changing any election laws. (The Section 5 list is bizarre: six of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy — and certain counties in three others — plus Alaska, Arizona, and some counties or townships in five other states as diverse as New Hampshire and South Dakota. Curiously, (only) three New York counties are covered, all boroughs in New York City. What is going on in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan that is not in Queens or Staten Island?) To obtain preclearance, proposed changes may not result in “retrogression,” a reduction in minority voters’ ability to elect their “preferred” candidates.

Section 5 was originally a valuable tool in the fight against systemic disenfranchisement, but now facilitates the very discrimination it was designed to prevent. Indeed, the prohibition on retrogression effectively requires districting that assures that minority voters are the majority in a set number of districts — an inherently race-conscious mandate. The law, most recently renewed in 2006 for another 25 years, is based on deeply flawed assumptions and outdated statistical triggers, and flies in the face of the Fifteenth Amendment’s requirement that all voters be treated equally.

In any event, because the D.C. court here had not yet ruled on preclearance, the San Antonio court felt obligated to draw “interim” maps for use pending final adjudication of both the Section 2 and 5 cases. Texas filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, arguing that the lower court insufficiently deferred to the Texas legislature’s maps. Now on an expedited briefing and argument schedule, Cato filed an amicus brief supporting neither side and arguing that this case demonstrates all that is wrong with the VRA as it currently exists — highlighting the tension between the VRA and the Constitution and the practical difficulties that conflict engenders for election administration.

Put simply, the VRA’s success has undermined its continuing viability; courts and legislatures struggle mightily and often fruitlessly to satisfy both the VRA’s race-based mandate and the Fifteenth Amendment’s equal treatment guarantee. We also point out that Section 5′s selective applicability precludes the establishment of nationwide districting standards, confounding lower courts and producing different, often contradictory, treatment of voting rights in different states — in large part because Sections 2 and 5 themselves conflict with each other. We note that regardless of the outcome of this litigation, it is unlikely that Texas will have fully legal electoral maps in time to administer the 2012 elections in a fair and efficient manner.

These difficulties — constitutional, statutory, and practical — disadvantage candidates, voters, legislatures, and courts, and undermine the VRA’s great legacy of vindicating the voting rights of all citizens. The Court should thus schedule this case for broader reargument on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act as presently conceived.

The Court will hear argument in Perry v. Perez on January 9.  See SCOTUSblog’s coverage for more on the case.

Supreme Court Should Use Texas Redistricting Case to Reconsider Voting Rights Act is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Since the foundational administrative law case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), courts have given significant deference to executive agency interpretations of federal law. United States v. Home Concrete & Supply tests whether there are any meaningful limits on such deference.

The case involves a group of taxpayers who initiated a number of transactions designed to reduce their tax liability by allowing a financial entity they created, Home Concrete, to increase its tax basis and reduce its taxable gain from the sale of certain assets. In June 2003, the IRS ruled that the taxpayers’ use of Home Concrete in this way was improper and issued an adjustment to their tax return (requiring payment of back-taxes). Having missed the standard three-year limit for such actions, however, the IRS argued that the adjustment was timely under a tax-code provision that extends the statute of limitations to six years if the taxpayer “omits from gross income an amount properly includible therein which is in excess of 25 percent of the amount of gross income stated in the return.”

Despite the Supreme Court’s having long ago held otherwise, Colony v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1956), the IRS argues that an overstatement of basis qualifies as an omission under that tax provision. Further, during the course of this litigation, the Treasury Department issued a new regulation “clarifying” the provision in a way that supports the IRS’s argument. The IRS now argues that this new regulation is controlling and should be retroactively applied to Home Concrete’s 1999 returns.

After (mostly) winning at the district court, the IRS lost before the Fourth Circuit and asked the Supreme Court to review the case—which involves one of many similar applications of the relevant tax provisions. The Court took the case and now Cato has joined the National Federation of Independent Business on an amicus brief supporting the taxpayers, arguing that sanctioning this sort of ad hoc rule-making would undermine the rule of law and the separation of powers.

We note that “[t]he government’s position is that this regulation is due judicial deference” but the Supreme Court has “consistently held that where a statute has an unambiguous meaning, an agency’s contrary interpretation is not entitled to deference.” As Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson noted in his Fourth Circuit concurrence, “agencies are not a law unto themselves” and the government’s position in this case “seems to [be] something of an inversion of the universe and to pass the point where the beneficial application of agency expertise gives way to a lack of accountability and a risk of arbitrariness.”

In deciding Chevron, the Supreme Court surely never intended to undermine the very structure of the Republic and unleash an administrative state wholly a law unto itself.

The Supreme Court will hear United States v. Home Cincrete & Supply on January 17.

The IRS Can’t Overrule the Supreme Court is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato today filed an amicus brief supporting a request that the Supreme Court review Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States.  Here’s the case:

The Arkansas Game & Fish Commission owns and operates 23,000 acres of land as a wildlife refuge and recreational preserve; the preserve’s trees are essential to its use for these purposes. Clearwater Dam, a federal flood control project, lies 115 miles upstream. Water is released from the dam in quantities governed by a pre-approved “management plan” that considers agricultural, recreational, and other effects downstream. 

Between 1993 and 2000, the government released more water than authorized under the plan. AGFC repeatedly objected that these excessive releases flooded the preserve during its growing season, which significantly damaged and eventually decimated tree populations. In 2001, the government acknowledged the havoc its flooding had wreaked on AGFC’s land and ceased plan deviations. By then, however, the preserve and its trees were severely damaged, so AGFC sued the government, claiming damages under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause.

The district court awarded $5.8 million in lost timber and reforestation costs based on the substantiality of the government’s flooding and the foreseeability of the damage it caused. The Federal Circuit reversed that decision, holding that the flooding of private land can never be a taking unless that flooding is permanent. It further held that, in determining whether the government’s intrusion on AGFC’s land was permanent or temporary, courts must focus on the character of the policy behind the intrusion rather the effects of the intrusion itself. A taking cannot have occurred here because each deviation from the plan constituted a “temporary” policy, the court concluded, so AGFC had no constitutional remedy.

AGFC is asking the Supreme Court to review its case; the Court itself has recognized that something less than a permanent invasion of land can constitute a compensable taking. Cato joined the Pacific Legal Foundation on a brief urging the Court to hear the case and uphold the Fifth Amendment rights of property owners whose land is destroyed by the federal government. Our brief highlights the conflict between the Federal Circuit’s decision and both Supreme Court and lower court precedent. First, an invasion of land by flooding is no different from an invasion of land by any other means. Second, the government’s self-professed “intent” that a possible taking be “temporary” should have no bearing on whether a Fifth Amendment remedy exists when that taking has, in fact, occurred. Instead, the relevant inquiry should be whether the government caused permanent damage and, if so, how much.

The Federal Circuit’s new rule — that, so long as it might be “temporary,” no government flooding can be remedied under the Fifth Amendment — runs afoul of the letter and spirit of a constitutional provision meant to compensate property owners for government intrusions on their land. We urge the Court to grant AGFC’s petition and maintain constitutional protections for private property.

The Supreme Court will decide in the new year whether to take the case, and would hear argument in the fall if it does.

The Government Must Compensate for Property Damage Even If Its Taking Was Only ‘Temporary’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Kansas City Premier Apartments v. Missouri Real Estate Commission is quite similar to the occupational licensing case of Locke v. Shore, in which Cato also recently filed a brief, except that the speech-licensing regulation here concerns not artistic expression but rather the dissemination of consumer-demanded commercial information — specifically, rental property listings that are free to the public.

The Missouri Real Estate Commission, acting on a complaint by a licensed realtor, decided that Kansas City Premier Apartments, which provides local rental listings, was acting as an unlicensed real estate broker and was therefore subject to fine and even criminal prosecution. (Before KCPA began operations, it had asked the Commission whether it needed a license and did not receive a clear answer other than that it was a “grey area” of law.)

KCPA challenged the Commission’s decision on First Amendment grounds, but the trial court found it to be constitutional without giving a reason for its conclusion. The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the trial court after simply presuming the constitutionality of the speech restriction — contrary to the U.S. Supreme Court holding in Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products Corp. that “[t]he party seeking to uphold a restriction on commercial speech carries the burden of justifying it” — and placing the burden of proving unconstitutionality on KCPA.

Cato has now joined the Pacific Legal Foundation on a brief supporting KCPA’s request that the U.S. Supreme Court hear the case. Our brief notes that “this case combines the nationally important commercial speech issue with the equally nationally important question of the extent to which the Constitution tolerates occupational licensing.” We explain the difficulties that the Court’s “commercial speech doctrine” has caused and argue for a movement toward greater protection for collective and commercial speech, and away from a confusing four-part test established in a 1980 case called Central Hudson.

As in Locke, this latest case raises the question of whether occupational licensing schemes that have an effect on speech are constitutional. Also as in Locke, an infinite array of professionals and ordinary people could get caught up in this regulation, including even a friend helping another friend find an apartment.

Beyond the technical legal points, the case implicates broader policy issues such as the right to earn a living and the impact that speech monopolies have on consumers. Indeed, the consumer impact may be even more apparent here than in other occupational licensing cases because so many people struggle to find affordable apartments and other rentals in this economy — not to mention over the course of their lives.

The Supreme Court will decide early in the new year whether to hear Kansas City Premier Apartments v. Missouri Real Estate Commission.

Should You Need a License to Help Someone Find an Apartment? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Challenges to Florida’s unconstitutional drug laws continue to gain momentum. Following a successful federal district court challenge to the constitutionality of state statutes lacking a mens rea requirement (mental culpability, rather than, for example, incidental possession), people convicted under them have come forward en masse to ask Florida courts to reexamine their convictions.

As described in the background to a previous brief in the case of Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, the district court held that these sorts of laws offend the constitutional guarantee of due process. Florida’s Supreme Court has now consolidated over 40 appeals resulting from that federal court decision (which itself is now on appeal). Cato has once again joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, Libertarian Law Council, and 38 law professors on a brief supporting the rights of persons convicted under the “strict liability” statutes.

We urge the Florida Supreme Court to follow the federal district court’s lead and strike down laws prohibiting the sale, possession, or delivery of illicit substances without requiring mental culpability. That court now has the opportunity to reverse these unwarranted convictions and purge a nationally singular stain on civil liberties.

The name of the case is Florida v. Adkins.

Thanks to legal associate Paul Jossey for his assistance with this brief and blogpost.

More on the Constitution’s Lack of a Drug-War Exception is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This post was co-authored by Cato legal associate Chaim Gordon.

Freedom-loving lawyers everywhere recoil in horror at the mere mention of “footnote four.” In that infamous citation in the 1938 case of Carolene Products, the Supreme Court officially renounced judicial review of laws that infringe on economic liberty. This week, in his dissent from the D.C. Circuit opinion that upheld the individual mandate on Commerce Clause grounds, Judge Brett Kavanaugh added his own dubious “footnote four.”

Judge Kavanaugh’s 65-page dissent was devoted to his parsimonious reading of various provisions in the Internal Revenue Code, culminating in the conclusion that the Anti-Injunction Act robbed federal courts of jurisdiction to hear the case until the mandate penalty is actually enforced. As Judge Kavanaugh noted, “the Tax Code is never a walk in the park.” But the Tax Code is even more grueling when you are given lousy legal advice. And that is why footnote four — in which Judge Kavanaugh inexplicably decides to publicly thank former IRS commissioners Mortimer Caplin and Sheldon Cohen and their counsel for their amicus brief – is so troubling. Here is his footnote four:

Both sides before us want this case decided now and contend that the Anti-Injunction Act does not bar this suit. The amicus brief of former IRS Commissioners Mortimer Caplin and Sheldon Cohen, submitted by able counsel Alan Morrison, cogently argued the opposite position. The Court is grateful to amici and counsel for their assistance.

But it is entirely unclear why Commissioners Caplin and Cohen and Counsel Morrison deserve the court’s thanks. For starters, the Caplin and Cohen brief was not advocating either of Judge Kavanaugh’s nuanced readings — be they correct or not – of various provisions in the Internal Revenue Code. (It did, however, make one of Kavanaugh’s main arguments in response to one of the government’s arguments toards the end of the brief.) Rather, the Caplin and Cohen brief broadly asserts that the AIA “prevents courts from reviewing all claims involving payments under the Code, not just those labeled taxes.”

The problem is that, in support of this broad, sweeping assertion, the Caplin and Cohen brief misleadingly cites cases that do not support its claim. That is, almost all the cases cited by the Caplin and Cohen brief specifically relied upon the fact that the penalties at issue were found in chapter 68 of the IRC or were part of a larger taxing scheme (as in the Mobile Republican case). But you would not know that from reading the Caplin and Cohen brief.

Take, for example, the Caplin and Cohen brief’s citation to Shaw v. United States and Botta v. Scanlon as “perhaps the best illustration of the breadth of the applicability of” the AIA. What the Caplin and Cohen brief does not say is that both of these cases specifically rely upon provisions in the IRC that define the penalty at issue in those cases (under section 6672) as taxes for the purposes of the AIA. Those provisions, by their own terms, only apply to penalties under chapter 68 of the Code, and the penalty for violating the individual mandate is in chapter 48.

This is really green-eyshade stuff, we know, but that’s what this litigation has come to — and it’s why tax lawyers are not suffering the higher rates of unemployment of their peers in other specialties.

To make matters worse, Caplin and Cohen filed essentially the same amicus brief with the Supreme Court in one of the cases that the Court will take up at its cert petition conference this week. This is especially alarming because the government has urged the Court to appoint an amicus counsel to argue for the position that the AIA applies to the penalty for violating the individual mandate (even though the government now agrees with the mandate’s challengers that the AIA does not apply).

We think the justices’ clerks are fully capable of advising their bosses on the pro-AIA arguments, which in any event does not apply to the 26 state plaintiffs in the Eleventh Circuit case.  Plus the Court has the Fourth Circuit’s and now Judge Kavanaugh’s thorough “briefs.” If the Court does decide to appoint an amicus to argue that issue, however, let’s hope that it receives better legal advice than the D.C. Circuit got from Caplin and Cohen.

Obamacare’s Footnote Four is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week the Supreme Court asked the University of Texas to respond to a cert petition raising an issue that in any non-Obamacare year would be the most explosive part of the Court’s docket: racial preferences in higher education.  (UT had for some inexplicable reason failed even to file a waiver, which is customary in cases where the respondent feels no need to file an actual brief.)

The case was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white Texan denied admission to UT-Austin even though her academic credentials exceeded those of admitted minority students.  The district court granted summary judgment to the university and the Fifth Circuit panel affirmed because a divided Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger (the University of Michigan case) found narrowly tailored racial preferences to be constitutionally justified for the sake of diversity.  Judge Emilio Garza wrote an electrifying concurrence — starting at page 58 here — agreeing that the ruling was correct under Grutter but that Grutter itself, and the regime of “soft” racial preferences (i.e., not quotas) it created, is incompatible with the Equal Protection Clause. 

The Fifth Circuit then denied en banc rehearing by a vote of 7-9, over a sharp dissent by Chief Judge Edith Jones.  (Full disclosure: The judge I clerked for lo those years ago, E. Grady Jolly, joined Chief Judge Jones’s dissent.)

Fisher’s cert petition objects to the wide discretion the Fifth Circuit would grant UT in administrating its racially preferential admissions paradigm, arguing that affording deference to the university extends Grutter and cannot be consistent with the “strict scrutiny” Grutter requires. Indeed, rather than working to phase out public university race preferences consistent with the expectations the Court articulated in Grutter – Justice O’Connor famously wrote that the diversity rationale would only suffice for about 25 years – the Fifth Circuit provides a veritable roadmap for discriminatory state action.

Now, it would be ideal if all nine justices were courageous enough to uphold constitutional protections for all citizens by refusing to legitimize racially discriminatory state action, regardless of the good-faith motives or other political atmospherics surrounding that action. Progressive legal theory being what it is, however, such a result, where people are judged on the content of their character/qualifications rather than the color of their skin, is unfortunately still a dream. There is, however, an argument that might sway even those members of the Court who support affirmative action as a policy matter: race preferences hurt those they are intended to help.

As highlighted in Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor’s amicus brief, a growing body of research suggests that when the capabilities of a student’s peers exceed their own, the student performs worse than when surrounded by peers with objectively similar capacities. Sander (a UCLA economist and law professor) and Taylor (a lawyer and journalist who has long covered civil rights issues) utilize this “mismatch theory” to discredit the assumption underlying race preference programs — that they benefit minorities — and demonstrate that the opposite is true. They further point out that racial preferences have failed to have their intended effects; namely, preventing racial balancing, fostering diversity, and making universities more attractive to minorities.

Three U.S. Civil Rights Commissioners also filed an amicus brief presenting evidence that racial preferences produce the opposite of their intended effect; they discourage rather than facilitate the entry of minorities into prestigious careers by incentivizing elite public universities to admit students they would not admit if admissions were race-blind. They argue that racial preferences place students in environments that do not optimize to their learning. Citing robust statistics, they conclude that this effect actually discourages minorities from entering science and engineering careers and becoming college professors, and decreases the number of minority students accepted to law schools who actually earn JDs and pass the bar exam.

The well-intentioned advocates of race-conscious public university admissions got it wrong under the Constitution. These briefs further illustrate the detriment everyone in society suffers when state action based on race rather than merit dictates the paths of young Americans.

Under the Court’s request for a response, the university has until the end of the month to file, unless it asks for and is granted an extension.  If the university’s response arrives by January, the case — if the Supreme Court takes it – should be on schedule for argument and decision this term.  For more on Fisher v. University of Texas, see the case’s SCOTUSblog page.

Thanks to Cato legal associate (and UT alumna) Anna Mackin for help with this blogpost.

The Longhorn Mismatch: Too Much Racial Preference, Too Little Success is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today the D.C. Circuit ruled that the individual mandate is a constitutional exercise of federal power under the Commerce Clause.  Senior Judge Laurence Silberman (Reagan appointee) wrote the opinion, which was joined by Senior Judge  Harry Edwards (Carter appointee).  Judge Brett Kavanaugh (George W. Bush appointee) dissented on jurisdictional grounds without reaching the merits, finding that the Anti-Injunction Act barred the suit until the individual mandate/penalty/tax goes into effect.  (The case is Seven-Sky v. Holder; see Cato’s amicus brief and a quick breakdown by Tim Sandefur.)

Sure, this is a loss for our side but it’s not a big deal. Every development in the Obamacare litigation has been anticlimactic since the Eleventh Circuit split with the Sixth, guaranteeing that the Supreme Court would take the case.  Today’s ruling, therefore, is notable not so much for its result — upholding the individual mandate — as for the reluctance with which it reached it.  

After acknowledging the novelty of the power Congress is asserting, the court expressed concern at “the Government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce.”  In other words, the majority saw itself bound by the Supreme Court’s broad reading of federal power under the Commerce Clause but felt “discomfort” at reaching a result that seemingly had no bounds.  

Indeed, the government has yet to tell any court in any of the cases what it cannot do under the guise of regulating interstate commerce.  But rest assured that the Supreme Court will ask again, and soon — it considers the myriad cert petitions later this week.  And if the high court is as unsatisfied with the government’s jurisprudential non-theory as the D.C. Circuit was, it will not hesitate to strike down this expansion of federal power. 

“Federalism is more than an exercise in setting the boundary between different institutions of government for their own integrity,” wrote Justice Kennedy for a unanimous Court last term (United States v. Bond).  “Federalism secures the freedom of the individual.” 

I am confident that the Supreme Court will not allow this unprecedented invasion of individual liberty.

D.C. Circuit Paves Way for Supreme Court Consideration of Obamacare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Florida is so zealous in pursuing the war on drugs that its laws classify the possession, sale, and delivery of controlled substances as crimes not requiring the state to prove that the defendant knew he had possessed, sold, or delivered those substances.

In Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, state prosecutors convicted Mackie Shelton of transporting cocaine under one of these “strict liability” statutes, the trial judge having instructed the jury that the state only needed to prove that Shelton delivered a substance and that the substance was cocaine. Shelton successfully challenged the constitutionality of that state law in federal court, where the district judge overturned the conviction and noted that “Florida stands alone in its express elimination of mens rea as an element of a drug offense.”

Florida appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Cato has joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, and 38 law professors on an amicus brief supporting Shelton’s position.

The Supreme Court has recognized only limited exceptions to the general rule that criminal culpability requires mens rea (a guilty mind). These “strict liability” crimes fall under the rubric of “public welfare offenses” and are typically what most people would not consider “serious,” such as traffic violations and selling alcohol to minors. Policymakers justify dispensing with mens rea requirements in such contexts by citing the need to deter businesses from imposing costs on society at large, or the burden that having to prove mens rea in these sorts of cases would overwhelm courts, or that the penalties are relatively small and carry little social stigma.

Florida’s legislature, however, went well beyond the normal boundaries of public welfare offenses in imposing strict liability for drug crimes that can carry significant prison terms — and thus violated the due process of law and traditional notions of fundamental fairness. As an alternative argument purporting to save its drug laws, Florida points to the availability of affirmative defenses, that these defenses (e.g., “I didn’t know it was cocaine”) to a presumption of guilty intent take the statute out of the (constitutionally dubious) strict liability category.

But a state may not simply presume the mens rea element of a crime: In Patterson v. New York (1977), for example, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors cannot reallocate the burden of proof by forcing a defendant to prove an affirmative defense. In requiring defendants to prove that they are “blameless” in these sorts of drug crimes, Florida’s statutes fail constitutional muster.

We urge the Eleventh Circuit to affirm the district court’s ruling that the offending state law unconstitutional.

There’s No Drug War Exception to the Constitution is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the last week, we’ve seen another slew of Supreme Court filings regarding the various Obamacare lawsuits.  Most notably, the private plaintiffs in the Florida/Eleventh Circuit case (the NFIB and two individuals)—represented by Mike Carvin and Randy Barnett, among others—filed their response to the government’s cert petition last Friday, two weeks before it was due! 

So, as with the cert petitions themselves at the end of September, the private plaintiffs initiated a “filing cascade” (my phrase, not a legal term of art) and forced the government’s hand.  The government then filed its consolidated response (to both the private and state plaintiff petitions) on Wednesday, and the (26) state plaintiffs—represented by former solicitor general Paul Clement—also filed their response to the government’s petition.

Got all that?  It basically means that all the necessary filings are in and the case is “ready for distribution” to the justices’ chambers for consideration of the cert petitions, which could happen as early as the Court’s November 10 conference. That means we could see an order about which case(s)/issue(s) the Court is taking as early as November 14.

So that’s the timing.  A brief note on substance: As you may recall, the Eleventh Circuit plaintiffs want the Court to review the following issues: whether the individual mandate exceeds federal power, the new Medicaid regulations/expansion as coercing the states, the mandate that states provide health insurance in their roles as employers, and severability.  The government, for its part, wants the Court to review the individual mandate, whether the Anti-Injunction Act makes the suits unripe (it argues that the AIA doesn’t apply but still, oddly, wants the Court to weigh in), and severability.  On this last point, the government has reiterated its position that if the individual mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating provisions must fall with it—a position that garnered some media attention but is both consistent with its previous arguments and honest lawyering.  (It’s disingenuous as a matter of basic economics to argue that the overall reform can survive without the individual mandate, even if that’s the incongruous position that the Eleventh Circuit took rejecting the government’s “concession” on severability.)  Of course, the government is also hoping that the idea that striking the individual mandate also means striking the provision requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions will make the Court hesitant to do so.

Note that the government also filed its response to the Liberty University petition and still has time to file a response to Virginia’s cert petition (on the state standing issue), both out of the Fourth Circuit.  It argues, as do the Eleventh Circuit plaintiffs, that the Court should hold these petitions (as well as the Thomas More Legal Center’s out of the Sixth Circuit) pending resolution of the Eleventh Circuit case.   Finally, the D.C. Circuit has yet to issue its opinion in the Obamacare case argued there a month ago.

For more on both the timing and which issues the Court is likely to take, see Lyle Denniston’s excellent analysis at SCOTUSblog.

Obamacare Litigation Update: All the Briefs the Supreme Court Needs to Take the Case Are In is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The latest example of liberty-reducing occupational licensing schemes comes to us from Florida, where a law restricts the practice of interior design to people the state has licensed. Those wishing to pursue this occupation must first undergo an onerous process ostensibly in the name of “public safety.”

In reality, the law serves as an anti-competition measure that protects Florida’s current cohort of interior designers. Our friends at the Institute for Justice have pursued a lawsuit against the law but lost their appeal in the Eleventh Circuit.

Cato has now joined the Pacific Legal Foundation on an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to review that ruling. The lower court got it wrong not just with respect to the right to earn a living, however, but also on First Amendment grounds.

That is, interior design, as a form of artistic expression, is historically protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, interior designers are measured primarily on the value of their aesthetic expression, not for any technical knowledge or expertise. This type of artistry is a matter of taste, and the designer and client usually arrive at the end result through collaboration and according to personal preferences. Thus, the designer-client relationship has little in common with traditionally regulated professions such as medicine, law and finance, where bad advice can have real and far-reaching consequences—but even then, the Supreme Court has emphasized the First Amendment implications of placing “prior restraints” on expression through burdensome licensing schemes.

Instead of following that precedent, however, the circuit court carved out a constitutionally unprotected exception for “direct personalized speech with clients.” Florida’s “public safety” justification is similarly weak, given that the state has presented no evidence of any bona fide concerns that substantiate a burdensome licensing scheme that includes six years of higher education and a painstaking exam—instead relying on cursory allegations that, for example, licensed designers are more adept at ensuring that fixture placements do not violate building codes.

Finally, the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling disregarded the infinite array of auxiliary occupations the Florida law subjects to possible criminal sanctions: wedding planners, branding consultants, sellers of retail display racks, retail business consultants, corporate art consultants, and even theater-set designers could all get swept in. The state has already taken enforcement actions against a wide spectrum of people who are not interior designers, including office furniture dealers, restaurant equipment suppliers, flooring companies, wall covering companies, fabric vendors, builders, real estate developers, remodelers, accessories retailers, antique dealers, drafting services, lighting companies, kitchen designers, workrooms, carpet companies, art dealers, stagers, yacht designers, and even a florist. This dragnet effect also suggests that the law is too broad to survive constitutional scrutiny.

The Court will likely decide by the end of the year (or early 2012) whether to take this case of Locke v. Shore.

Should You Need a License to Hang Curtains? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Hawaii continues to think that it’s not quite part of the United States and thus not fully subject to U.S. law.

In the 2000 case of Rice v. Cayetano, the Supreme Court struck down race-based voting requirements for certain Hawaii state officers because government schemes that distinguish between “native Hawaiian” and “Hawaiian” are racial classifications that must pass “strict scrutiny” to be deemed constitutional; they must be narrowly tailored to achieve a truly “compelling” purpose (a standard nearly impossible to meet). Yet that exact same category of “native Hawaiian” — whose frighteningly archaic definition is “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778” — was used in the Hawaii Homes Commission Act to distinguish those who can hold certain leases that are subject to little or no property tax.

A group of Hawaiians who do not meet the state’s definition of “native Hawaiian” and therefore suffer under the explicitly race-based law decided to challenge these property-tax exemptions. After paying their taxes, these plaintiffs sought refunds on the grounds that the classification scheme violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The Supreme Court of Hawaii, however, ruled that they didn’t have standing — a legal doctrine that determines who can bring a claim — to challenge the taxes on the ground that they had not yet asked for the leases (for which they were indisputably ineligible due to not having enough “blood of the races” flowing through their veins). A lower state court had even ruled that the classification was not race-based—that it merely distinguishes leaseholders and non-leaseholders, even though Hawaiians without the sufficient “blood quantum” cannot be leaseholders!

The group of taxpayers now seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court. Cato, joined by the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, the Goldwater Institute, and Professor Paul M. Sullivan, filed a brief urging the Court to take the case and rectify Hawaii’s explicitly unconstitutional taxation scheme. We argue that, after Hawaii’s state judiciary refused to address the issue of racial discrimination head-on, only the U.S. Supreme Court is in a position to guarantee the constitutional protections that Hawaiians have lived under for over a century (since Hawaii became a territory). Only by taking this case and overturning the racially charged definition can the Court continue to ensure that Hawaii is a state that “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

The Supreme Court will likely decide by the end of the year (or in early 2012) whether to hear this case, Corboy v. Louie.

Race-Based Tax Exemptions Are Unconstitutional is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog