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What’s up with Tyler v. Hennepin County?
Next week, SCOTUS is hearing a case from Minnesota. The county foreclosed on a home with $15,000 in tax debt. It made $40,000 from the sale and kept all of it as a windfall in accordance with state law. The 94-year-old owner sued on takings clause (and due process, and 8th amendment) grounds.
The district court dismissed all claims. The circuit court affirmed. What gives?
It feels like there should be protections against the state profiting off the difference from tax debt and market value. Is this just one of those situations where it turns out there are no rights? Am I missing something?
Home seizure is one of the canonical examples for illustrating "substantive due process" versus "procedural due process." This is (and probably always will be) a pretty hotly contested bit of American jurisprudence; procedural due process is "was the procedure followed" while substantive due process is more about law-in-equity, i.e. "was justice truly done." If your city or state craft ordinances that, through totally procedurally sound action, works a clear injustice, it's not usually all that difficult to get people to agree that something has gone awry. Based on the Court's posture toward asset forfeiture in Timbs v. Indiana (they decided it violated the Eighth Amendment as excessive), I would not be at all surprised to see Hennepin County definitively lose this case.
However, the main question in my mind is that this is a "tax" case, rather than a "fines" case, and Chief Justice Roberts famously saved Obamacare by giving "tax" status to something that essentially no one thought of as a "tax." Remember that without the Sixteenth Amendment, income tax was clearly an unconstitutional taking. (Personally, I'm very comfortable with the proposition that the Sixteenth Amendment was deeply immoral, and that most taxation is indeed simply theft, but at least it is a kind of theft that was given special exemption in the Constitution.) Strictly speaking, so long as they aren't violating any state laws on the matter, a U.S. county has the power to levy as much property tax against your property as they wish, which could have the practical effect of confiscating anyone and everyone's property for government use (by setting the tax well above the value of the property).
I would hope that, in such a case, the courts would quickly call out the tax as a pretext to seizure and thus declare that it falls afoul of the Fifth Amendment! But courts are remarkably skittish in every case that tends to expose the fact that all taxes are inescapably coercive and confiscatory, with thin justification.
Wait, what? Who thought that? My sense is that everyone knew it was a tax, but that label had been avoided by proponents of the bill.
It sure felt a lot like a tax, given that it was a box to check or uncheck when filing a federal tax return which changed the amount of the check one had to write to the treasury.
Right, when Congress itself functionally says "this law is not a tax," the Court has historically deferred to that. It's similar to the shenanigans (still) pulled by many cities who levy "fees" and "fines" that often seem more like taxes (compare also state universities who are sometimes forbidden from raising tuition, who then raise "fees" instead). When neither the proponents nor the opponents of the bill claim it's a proper tax, that makes the class of people thinking it's a proper tax pretty small (analytically, limited only to those who both don't care either way and for whatever reason have a strong opinion about calling money collected by the IRS "taxes" rather than "fees"). Roberts' decision heaped motivated judicial reasoning atop legislative shenanigans. To his credit, I suppose, that has been the primary function of the Supreme Court for most of the 20th century, but that doesn't mean it's a good way to do things.
I'm not sure if you're making a distinction with "proper" tax, but opponents, heck even Democrats, definitely claimed it was a tax, and it was a live enough question to get addressed in a one-on-one (sorry, it's an amp link):
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/ThisWeek/Politics/transcript-president-barack-obama/story%3fid=8618937
Stephanopoulos in that exchange appears to be saying that requiring you to pay for insurance is essentially a tax. Look at Obama's claim:
What SCOTUS decided was not that paying for insurance is a tax, but that the resultant penalty if you don't is a tax--even though fines are not generally regarded as taxes. So this sound bite is not on point; they're literally talking about something else.
They're not talking about something else, though. Did you read the full conversation? I just quoted that bit (and elided some) because I found Stepho's pulling out a dictionary and President Obama's swift about-face on "words have a meaning" amusing. But prior to that bit, it's quite clear they're discussing a penalty (Shared Responsibility Payment, "responsibility" being the buzzword) for not buying insurance:
You're correct that in 2012 SCOTUS ruled the penalty (which is what makes the purchase a "mandate" rather than a friendly request) a tax--it's the only way Congress has power to impose such a thing. It's simply amusing because of how hard the administration has pushed "it's not a tax!", then subsequently had to go to court and argue it was a tax.
But even then they didn't really argue that it was a tax. The Obama administration argued that the penalty--and they definitely continued at that point to call it a penalty--was constitutional. There is an attenuated sense in which they claimed it was a "tax" at this point, in that they made an argument in the alternative that even if the penalty was otherwise inappropriate, it was permissible under Congress' taxation powers. That's the (stupid) argument Roberts seized on in seeking to preserve Obamacare, but until his decision came out, the "it's a tax" argument was widely regarded as pretextual at best. When I said that "essentially no one" thought of it as a tax, I don't mean "literally nobody floated this argument ever," I mean I was up to my eyeballs in debates (mostly with other lawyers) about this issue at the time and I just never encountered a serious and well-developed claim that the question turned on "it's a tax." This was surely in part because opponents wanted Obamacare to fail entirely, and proponents (like Obama himself) had very vocally insisted that it's not a tax.
But this is all a weirdly autistic tangent anyway, given that even if I just had a wildly idiosyncratic experience at the time, and you are totally correct that there was some substantial contingent of people who believed the penalty was a tax all along--then my warning about the weird directions SCOTUS might take the Minnesota case is all the more true.
Again I'm gonna have to differ here, and I think the Stephanopoulos interview bears me out. George brought out a dictionary and Obama handwaved away the meaning of "tax", for gosh sake.
What question, precisely? "Can Congress make people pay this" or "Is a penalty for inaction constitutional"? Because, if it's the latter, your lawyer friends missed the forest for the trees, I'd say.
You know, I seem to be called/implied to be autistic fairly frequently online. Maybe I should get checked or something. Is there a test? To me, if it was important enough for you to use as a point in your post, it's important enough to warrant accuracy, or further exploration if needed. If we retcon the shit out of history, we can't learn much from it.
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