SCOTUS Whittles Away at Taxpayer Rights

It would be nice if, in this country, we had a mainstream media outlet that actually worked on behalf of the public interest, instead of people having to troll esoteric news sources to find out what's truly going on. Via The Wild Hunt's link round-up, I came across this recent decision from the Supreme Court:

The Court pares down, to the absolute minimum, the right of taxpayers to challenge government programs that provide financial aid to religion. Arizona’s tax credit system that benefits parochial students survives a challenge.

In Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, a group of taxpayers filed suit against an Arizona policy that "allows those who donate money to school tuition organizations – which, according to the taxpayers, mostly sponsor scholarships to religious schools – to receive tax credits for their donations."

At the SCOTUS blog, as Lyle Denniston explains, the 5-4 decision that "came very close on Monday to taking away altogether the right of taxpayers to go to court to challenge government programs that provide financial aid to religion,"

One practical implication of the new decision was the obvious survival of Arizona’s 14-year-old program of giving individual taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar credit on their state taxes when they make contributions to private, non-profit groups that provide scholarships to private school students.   The program has been under challenge in state and federal courts from its beginning, but has been in effect since 1999; the largest organizations that hand out the subsidized scholarships do so for parochial students.  The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the program would fail constitutionally if it actually went to trial, but now there is no apparent candidate eligible to pursue such a challenge.


In broader terms, the Court’s decision appeared certain to encourage those who support parochial education to seek far wider adoption of the tax credit approach in order to channel money to often cash-strapped parochial schools.

Justice Elena Kagen wrote the dissenting opinion:

She accepted the view of the challengers that the Arizona program, in fact, uses public tax revenues to subsidize parochial tuition.  Since the program’s origin, her opinion said, it “has cost the state…nearly $350 million in diverted tax revenues.”  The decision, she said, “devastates taxpayer standing” in cases involving claims that the government is breaching the constitutional wall of separation between religion and government.  She accused the majority of seriously misinterpreting, and “ravaging,” the Flast precedent.  “In not a single non-trivial respect could the Flast Court recognize its handiwork in the majority’s depiction.”

The dissenting opinion said the majority had manufactured a new distinction between direct spending subsidies and aid to religion through tax credits.  That conclusion, Justice Kagan wrote, “has as little basis in principle as it has in our precedent….Taxpayers pick up the cost of the subsidy in either form….What is a cash grant today can be a tax break tomorrow.”  The majority opinion, Kagan said, allows a taxpayer to challenge a grant, but not a tax break, but she argued that a tax break is just another form of a “tax expenditure.”

So, there is another step in the ongoing march of the conservative fascists as they trample the Constitution and run slip-shod over taxpayer rights.