The Supreme Court Made Just About Everyone Happy for Once
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
If it costs more money to sell the house at face value of taxes owed then the state may be deterred.
Unless, corruption occurs where a tax hike is implemented one year causing undue hardship, forfeiture happens, houses are seized, sold at the value of tax shortfall to a “unrelated private citizen” and then sold off for profit, profit then being somehow funneled into the local politician who made that unreasonable tax hike?
Prop 13 in California doesn’t exist for just any old reason…
I'm assuming they foreclose, because in the same way like banks they have their own series of expenses that 'the public' voted to spend that need paid.
I'd highly recommend a podcast called 'Five Four' where they talk about the supreme court as a political body, rather than as the impartial "balls and strikes" role that if purports to be.
Roe vs Wade is an excellent example of this. Which is why finally getting rid of it was a good thing.
I can’t speak for every jurisdiction, but I do know that offering installment plans is a standard part of tax repayment plans.
These situations don’t occur until the back tax amount is relatively large. It takes many years and ignoring many, many tax collection attempts to reach this level of back taxes.
I understand why you’d want to prohibit this type of asset seizure, but you need to consider the unintended consequences: Many people would stop paying taxes if there was no real consequence for doing so. If you’re a shady landlord who intends to rent a house out forever and never sell it, why would you bother paying taxes if the laws prevented the government from actually collecting them from you?
They could also make exceptions for owner-occupied vs. investment property. It's one thing to seize (or threaten to seize) someone's profitable business assets to force them to pay their taxes, it's another thing altogether to force an old lady out of her only home onto the street.
Finally, they could even simply accept the reality that a certain percentage of very poor homeowners just cannot afford their taxes, accept this humanely, and budget accordingly. I'd be willing to pay 0.5% more or whatever on my property taxes if it meant Tax Foreclosures were abolished.
But, the county shouldn't get to keep the complete proceeds from the sale; they should get their duly owed taxes and fees, any expenses from the sale, and that's it. Any excess should go to leins and secured, perfected debt holders, and any remaining should go to the owner. Anything else doesn't make sense.
There could also be a question of how $2,300 in unpaid taxes aquires $13,300 in interest and penalties in a near zero interest rate environment, but that's doesn't seem to be disputed in this case.
That said, the facts of this case didn’t support taking this any further than they did. The woman in question had practically abandoned the property, ignored all the notices, and had ample opportunity to try and pay what she owed (which was not originally $15K).
She took exception only after the County profited from the Sale. I mean, honestly it wasn’t a favorable case for her but for the fact the Court wanted an opportunity to address this specific moral hazard.
I think the bigger issue is that it is expressly Constitutional with terms laid out in the Constitution, not that it is a political question.
That’s not mutually exclusive though: addressing eminent domain is still a political question for those that choose to pursue it, and you can still lobby your legislature to curtail it.
Since I just got done reading this:
https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-History-England-Earliest-B...
I was highly amused. The basis of English common law was, indeed, being laid back then, and it probably won't surprise you to know that landless peasants had very few rights.
Second, the court's makeup is politically decided
Third, the court has in the past ( roe v wade ) chosen to be unanimous when reports say internally there was some dissenters.
Public mockery on teh interwebs?
But we’ll know more about how well that 3-3-3 theory holds as the body of opinions published by Justices Barrett and Jackson becomes more fleshed out.
That's an interesting take. I'm guessing the divisions are Bush appointees are institutionalists, Democrat appointees are partisans, Trump appointees are partisans?
Thomas, Alito, Coney Barrett tend to be partisan conservatives.
Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Roberts, and Kagan tend to be mainstream jurists (whether that's "institutionalist," I'm not sure). If you see Kagan side with the conservatives or Gorsuch, Roberts, or Kavanaugh side with the liberals, it's usually in favor of the mainstream, centrist, legal establishment view. The differences between them tend to relate to mainstream legal debates (e.g., the proper role of Chevron deference in the administrative state; Kagan was an admin law professor, whereas Gorsuch in particular is skeptical of Chevron deference).
Sotomayor, Brown Jackson tend to be partisan leftists.
> Obama only got one person on the benchThe court is pretty heavily Textualist and/or Originalist with Justice Thomas at the Originalist extreme and Justice Gorsuch at the Textualist extreme, but along the less Institutional axis you have Justices Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito and along the more Institutionalist end you have Chief Justice Roberts (at the extreme) and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett.
The liberal Justices tend to get lumped together, but it’s worth noting a couple of details: the original formulation of the theory of the 3-3-3 court was with Justice Breyer who retired and was replaced by Justice Jackson. Justice Kagan is probably the most Institutionalist of these 3 and has always had an excellent rapport with the Federalist Society, Justice Sotomeyer in my estimation has always been the one most likely to defer to the Executive branch when they are a party to a case (but I formed that opinion during the Obama administration, it may not have aged well and I should re-examine it regardless) and I don’t feel confident in the slightest giving a good assessment of Justice Jackson without seeing more from her, I barely feel like we’ve seen enough from Justice Barrett and some think she might be more with the Thomas and Gorsuch end than with the Chief and Kavanaugh going by this current term which would make this a 4-2-3 court instead.
Long story short, it’s nuanced but all most people see is who appointed who and the final tally in cases with heavier partisan splits, but the manner in which a case was decided (the controlling opinion in other words) matters more for future jurisprudence than the judgement itself which is important primarily to the parties involved. Given a choice, Roberts pushes for cases to be decided as narrowly as possible, but that’s harder to do when he’s more likely to be the 6th vote than the 5th vote.
They are passing problems upstream and making the SC waste time setting precedent on cases that should be blindingly obvious.
If the lower court ruled based on precedent - even if it was misapplied - then they’re doing what’s expected of them.
The attorneys on the losing side might be the most "guilty" because they should have known better.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-supreme-courts-part...
You may personally appreciate it, but suppose he had been quoting different religions texts. Say the need to nourish Mayan gods using sacrificial blood.
Compare and contrast it with Lemon v. Kurtzman
While sourced from the Bible, it has a secular-enough meaning that I wouldn't stress it.
Besides, are you sure you've never used such a phrase without thinking about it? "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." I'm sure you'd much rather "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". So maybe just be a charitable "Good Samaritan" and "turn the other cheek", even if you don't really like it, then. After all, "an eye for an eye" policy is fairly unpleasant.
Oh, who am I kidding? I'm just "casting pearls before swine" with this audience. (And being as foolish as "the prodigal son", at that.) I can see that "the writing is on the wall," and I won't get anywhere with anyone on this topic. I'll probably even get downvoted for this, but oh well. "Sow the wind" and "reap the whirlwind" as they say. (Hacker News really can be "the blind leading the blind" sometimes.)
Still jarring.
Perhaps you may be disturbed or offended by a phrase that happens to come from the bible. Others are not, and take it simply as a historical analogy. I'm not Christian and I don't find it disturbing. You might be getting overly offended in this case.
The only way this could have been worse would be if they seized the property, sold it for a lower value than was owed and send a bill for the less amount still owed. Sheesh, we have some f'd up government rules
This is why I'm against centrists. They don't stand for anything other than enforcing the status quo, no matter how unjust it is. They have no principles; they're just conflict-avoidant. There is something broken both intellectually and morally in trying to leverage a 750-year old feudal statute to win an argument in a 21st century democratic Republic (or even an 18th century one, if you consider the US dysfunctional in the way I do) which exists specifically because its founders rejected feudalism. I'm genuinely surprised because Neal Katyal is an intelligent person and a very experienced litigator, so he had to know that this argument was bullshit on multiple levels.
Isn't a lawyer supposed to argue on behalf of their client and not necessarily their personal beliefs? Sure, sometimes they align, but I've heard some pretty crazy things come out of a lawyer's mouth in whatever they need to provide the full throated legal argument for their client (even if it's not the best legal argument)
+15k tax due, plus penalties +5k in administrative fees related to the seizure +5k in administrative fees related to the sale +5k in accounting and administrative fees for the processing of the return of excess value +10k service fee +10k convenience fee
Now she still owes them 10k…
“Economic penalties imposed to deter willful noncompliance with the law are fines by any other name,” he wrote. “And the Constitution has something to say about them: They cannot be excessive.”
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-rules-against...
> "The environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, which filed an amicus brief in the Sackett case, said the court's decision "undoes a half-century of progress generated by the Clean Water Act," eliminating protections from almost 90 million acres (36.4 million hectares) of wetlands."