A Judicial Purse-Snatching Is an Invitation to Tyranny : Taxes: Now that judges have been given the power to order increases, rule by the judiciary can’t be far behind.

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court abolished representative democracy and along with it, the U.S. Constitution, California’s Proposition 13, supply-side economics, federalism, the separation of powers and the national tax-limitation and balanced-budget amendment movement.

The court did this by decreeing that federal judges have the authority to order legislative bodies to raise taxes and to issue injunctions to block enforcement of laws and state constitutions that limit or cap tax increases.

Elected legislatures and the people to whom they are accountable no longer have control over the power of the purse or the quantity and quality of public expenditures. The court’s ruling in a Kansas City, Mo., school desegregation case transfers all meaningful governmental power to the federal judiciary. It will take some time for judicial tyranny to become fully manifest, but the process for establishing judicial rule is now in place. Unless we revolt, we have lost our freedom.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose powerful dissent was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia, warned: “Today’s casual embrace of taxation imposed by the unelected, life-tenured federal judiciary disregards fundamental precepts for the democratic control of public institutions.” In words echoing the Declaration of Independence, the dissenting justices said that the court’s “assertion of judicial power in one of the most sensitive of policy areas, that involving taxation, begins a process that over time could threaten fundamental alteration of the form of government our Constitution embodies.”

The dissenting justices reminded their liberal colleagues (to no effect) that under the Constitution, “the power of taxation is one that the federal judiciary does not possess.” Both state and federal constitutions explicitly give the legislative branch of government the power to tax. Legislative control over the purse reflects “our ideal that the power of taxation must be under the control of those who are taxed.” The dissenters rejected the majority’s sophistry that there is a difference between the power of a judge to impose a tax directly and his power to order elected officials to impose a tax.

Unfortunately for democracy in America, past appointments to the Supreme Court have saddled us with a majority of tyrants who believe that they, not the Constitution, are the power. Since they believe that the Constitution has no inherent meaning and means only whatever they say it means, appeals to the Constitution’s clear, unambiguous language carry no weight. The Five Tyrants--Justices Byron R. White, William J. Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens--need to be impeached. Before this happens, more Americans than those in Kansas City (and Yonkers, N.Y.) will have to directly experience rule by judicial diktat.

It may not be long in coming. As the dissenting justices point out, “there is no obvious limit to the ruling that would prevent judicial taxation in cases involving prisons, hospitals or other public institutions, or indeed to pay a large damages award levied against a municipality.”

As a result of the ruling, all property owners in the United States now have unpredictable and open-ended financial obligations for which there is no recourse.

Liberals will assure us that although the judges now have this power, it will be exercised with care and restraint. But as Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The situation looks even more serious when we look at it through the window of Judge Robert Bork’s recent book, which reveals that many of our law schools teach doctrines that justify law based on the political sentiments of the judges. There is little to restrain the judges from those who are tyrannized by them.

As a result of the court’s ruling, anyone who continues to hold municipal bonds or real property--including their homes--would appear to be foolish, because federal judges can now wreck the tax base of any state or municipality and destroy real estate values by running up property taxes. Indeed, there is nothing in the ruling that limits judicial taxation to property taxes.

The supply-side revolution has been canceled in one fell swoop. It is no longer possible to recommend that anyone invest in the United States or carry on any activity that requires non-removable assets.

It is possible that the American people won’t accept the usurpation of power by the judiciary, which in effect turns our legislative bodies into a cloak for judicial tyranny. However, so far they have accepted everything else--routine release of dangerous criminals, destruction of neighborhood schools, busing of their children, racial quotas in university admissions and the workplace. We have become an effete people since the time our ancestors condemned King George III “for imposing taxes on us without our Consent” and “for taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our Government.”