Okay everyone, time for a math problem.
Let’s say that a woman owes approximately $15,000 to the government for back taxes and penalties. So, the government seizes her home to pay for that and sells that home for approximately $40,000. Approximately, how much does the government owe the original homeowner?
If you said ‘nothing,’ you would apparently be the state of Minnesota.
But, crucially, you would not be any member of the Supreme Court.
Yes, Thursday was opinion day at the Supreme Court, and one of the opinions handed down was Tyler v. Hennepin County (2023) and that hypothetical is basically what was going on.
This thread was published just before oral argument (which was a month ago) and it does a good job providing background on the case:
Thread: The Supreme Court is hearing a big case tomorrow. It should unite everyone: left, right & center. And the national press has almost totally ignored it.
It centers on an elderly woman who fell behind on her taxes. So the county took her home, sold it, and kept the profit. pic.twitter.com/dDNs7zmXPA
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
Her name is Geraldine Tyler. After falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes, the county added $13,000 in penalties, interests & fees.
When she couldn't pay, they seized her condo—valued at $93,000—sold it for $40,000, and kept the leftover $25,000. https://t.co/o8I5vfQVuN
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
The Supreme Court will decide if that's constitutional. It sounds like an easy case. But it has not been.
Multiple federal courts ruled against Geraldine, and said the government did nothing wrong by stealing her equity after it satisfied her debt. https://t.co/JsJGkYvfG3
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
That’s honestly the shocking part. She lost in the District Court and in the Eighth Circuit, and it was only at the Supreme Court that she won. But she did so unanimously.
Geraldine is far from the only victim. The stories are nauseating.
At 76 years old, Bennie Coleman lost his DC home over a $134 bill. The gov't sold the $197,000 house & kept the profit.
For months, Bennie slept on the porch—with dementia—thinking he'd locked himself out.
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
Then there's Tawanda Hall, who fell $900 behind on a property-tax payment plan for her Michigan home. After penalties, she owed $22,642.
The gov't seized her $300,000 house, sold it, and kept the profit.
The surplus totaled $286,000. This is not a joke. https://t.co/o8I5vfQVuN
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
Let me put this in perspective. In Michigan, defendants found guilty of stealing over $20,000 face a decade in prison.
When the government stole *10 times* that—leaving a mom and her kids completely bankrupt—it was all in a day's work.
Make it make sense.
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
This preys on the most vulnerable. And the gov't has gotten away with it, bc people don't know it's happening.
Well, people need to know. Because if it can happen to them, it can happen to you. SCOTUS should call it what it is: theft, plain & simple. /end https://t.co/o8I5vfQVuN
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 26, 2023
Government is just a name for the things we do together, like steal houses from old people and then sell those houses and give the equity built up in the houses to the government to waste. https://t.co/ge3mHAm4MM
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) April 26, 2023
This author is not the kind of guy to call taxation ‘theft,’ but the term ‘theft’ is extremely apt here.
You can read the opinion at this link:
The Supreme Court's third and final opinion of the day is in Hennepin; the court, per Roberts, unanimously holds that this 👇 gives rise to a valid takings claim.https://t.co/s0NUb2Z0nq pic.twitter.com/Ig2TJKUICf
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 25, 2023
It’s actually one of the shorter opinions we have seen from the Supreme Court. It is twenty pages, including the syllabus (an unofficial summary that isn’t law but is typically excellent) and the concurrence. The real meat of the opinion doesn’t start until page six of the pdf file, and finishes on page seventeen, so it’s basically only eleven pages long. But, honestly, it seemed to take longer than necessary. As one lawyer said, discussing the oral arguments:
Even at SCOTUS, some cases are resolved on the “Come on, man” principle.
— Raffi Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) April 26, 2023
Really, that’s pretty much the principle here. They could have saved the paper and just wrote ‘duh.’
We think the concurrence is only mildly interesting. You see, the main opinion addressed the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. As you might know, the Fifth Amendment says (in relevant part) that ‘nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation’ and, as we discussed previously, this applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The main opinion focused on that and said basically that Ms. Tyler had a right to the money that remained. Duh.
As for the concurrence, it was written by Justice Gorsuch and joined by Justice Jackson, and it basically argued that while the majority is right to say it is an illegal taking without just compensation under the Fifth Amendment, it was also an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. In other words, he isn’t disagreeing with the majority, but saying that he thinks this is another reason why the state of Minnesota should lose.
So, while there wasn’t much controversy over the decision today, there was some commentary. Ilya Somin’s discussion is pretty good:
My take on today's important unanimous Supreme Court victory for property rights in Tyler v. Hennepin County. Ruling puts an end to home equity theft, and sets important precedent for future takings cases. But some key issues are left vague or unresolved. https://t.co/NtDvHnZqaY
— Ilya Somin (@IlyaSomin) May 25, 2023
As noted in the post, Tyler was represented by @PacificLegal, which is also my wife @AlisonSomin's employer (though she was not part of the team litigting the case). Congrats to @PacificLegal on TWO unanimous SCOTUS wins in one day (this one and Sackett v. EPA).
— Ilya Somin (@IlyaSomin) May 25, 2023
And this commentary is fun:
Just read the Supreme Court's Minnesota property tax/takings case. It's clearly right, but it leaves me with one nagging question:
Who was the idiot in the Hennepin County government who thought litigating this was a good idea? 1/ https://t.co/ApSdOLUusP
— Sam Brunson (@smbrnsn) May 25, 2023
To be fair, Minnesota won until they got to the Supreme Court.
I mean, the idea that the state can sell property to satisfy a tax debt AND keep the whole amount, even if it exceeds the outstanding debt, is absurd, even granting that we live in a world where, for some reason, civil forfeiture still happens. 2/
— Sam Brunson (@smbrnsn) May 25, 2023
But also, when you're keeping the money of a 93-year-old woman, there's no world in which you're not the villain. Like, in terms of sympathetic plaintiffs, this is probably the sympathetic-est. 3/
— Sam Brunson (@smbrnsn) May 25, 2023
Lawyers have a saying: ‘Good facts make good law. Bad facts make bad law.’ One can have no doubt that Pacific Legal scoured the country for the most sympathetic plaintiff possible. It’s frankly a basic tactic of activist lawyering.
For instance, it is not an accident that Dick Heller, the plaintiff in D.C. v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) who challenged D.C.’s draconian gun control laws worked as a police officer in the territorial courts of the district. People opposed to those laws were looking for a person with a sympathetic case and it was hard to find a more sympathetic plaintiff on that issue. Every day he carried a handgun at work, protecting federal judges. But then, when he went home at night, he was not allowed to have a handgun to protect himself, those he cared for, or his home, driving home the absurdity of D.C. gun control. If he can be trusted to carry a handgun to protect judges, how can we pretend we can’t trust him with a handgun to protect the things he is likely to care about the most?
But also straightfacedly arguing that, because she has debts on the property in excess of the excess value of the property? How freaking economically illiterate do you have to be to not recognize that that doesn't mean no getting the money has no economic impact on her? 4/
— Sam Brunson (@smbrnsn) May 25, 2023
Like, I'm glad the Supreme Court got this right (unanimously). But who were the idiots who ensured that they had to hear it?!? 5/5
— Sam Brunson (@smbrnsn) May 25, 2023
Unanimous Decision From a “Packed Court”?
“Lower courts ruled against her, dismissed her case—the Supreme Court unanimously sided with her arguments & held that she brought a valid claim under the Takings Clause”https://t.co/5Cf4wZimxI
— TheConstantineChronicles (@CDO1962) May 25, 2023
PLF press release says it "is sending letters to all states that permit this practice, demanding that they change their laws to comply with today’s Supreme Court decision. States that neglect to follow PLF’s guidelines for reform may be subject to liability in takings lawsuits."
— Sarah Rumpf (@rumpfshaker) May 25, 2023
PLF stands for the Pacific Legal Foundation.
This shows you the incompetence of the lower courts' knowledge of the constitution. This was an easy argument that the government violated the Fifth Amendment's "Takings Clause" by confiscating property worth more than the debt owed by the owner. https://t.co/xrGapNJdmj
— Wes Erickson (@WesErickson007) May 25, 2023
We tend to default to respect for federal judges. Even when we disagree with them, we don’t typically think they are actually stupid. But it is mystifying that she kept losing until she got to the Supreme Court and then she won, unanimously. Normally, you don’t see that kind of record unless the Supreme Court announced a new rule of law—but that doesn’t apply here. We don’t have an explanation as of now for why the lower courts found against her.
Also, here’s one detail we haven’t seen so much focus on: Ms. Tyler also wants this to become a class action suit. Bluntly, if this is the kind of nonsense going on in any state, we hope she makes them pay through the nose—or perhaps through a different orifice, if you catch our meaning.
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