Month: March 2024

Supreme Court Writes Finis to Trump Ballot Challenges

Just when you thought you were free of my Section 3 rantings (my last post was about something else), they’re back. Well, on Monday the Supreme Court issued its decision in Trump v. Anderson, and I have to talk about it.

Newsflash: all nine justices agreed that the State of Colorado does not get to exclude Trump from the ballot because the presidency is a national office and individual states do not get to judge the Section 3 disqualification for it. Four of the justices wrote separate opinions (one by Justice Barrett and another jointly by Justices Sotomayer, Kagan, and Jackson) saying that was enough and the Court should have gone no farther. But the other five justices supported a per curiam opinion which indicates that at least for federal offices, Section 3 may not be enforced at all in the absence of Congressional legislation.

The end result is that the Supreme Court of Colorado was reversed, Trump gets on that ballot, and any challenge in any other State is doomed. While it is not a result with which I disagree as a legal proposition,1 I am most concerned about what it says about the ability of States to exclude otherwise ineligible candidates from their ballots, such as persons who are not citizens or do not meet the constitutional age or residency requirements, seemingly inconsistent with one of Justice Gorsuch’s decisions when he was on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals: “[A] state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.”2

It also leads to a greater possibility of inconsistency as I discussed in Takes on Trump v. Anderson Oral Argument 3: National or State Office Should Not Make a Difference; “if Candidate A is an insurrectionist, Candidate A should not be eligible for any office, from dog catcher to President.”

It may be that the majority wanted to foreclose piece-meal challenges to individual acts during a hypothetical second Trump administration.

I have to read the decision a few more times.

Jay Bohn

March 8, 2024

  1. See my posts from last September, starting here. ↩︎
  2. Hassan v. Colorado, 495 F. App’x 947 (10th Cir. 2012). ↩︎

Higher EV Registration Fees and Tax “Fairness”

Nobody likes taxes, but they would not be so bad if other people would pay their “fair share” so that I could pay less. You hear this all the time, often in the context that “the rich” should always pay more income taxes. What brings this to mind right now, however, is a Star Ledger guest column entitled “EVs tear up N.J. roads. They should pay their fair share to fix them” by Matthew Hale (published on-line on March 1, 2024, and in print on March 3, 2024). Professor Hale wants to buy a pickup truck, just because, but is ticked that he would have to pay more than his fair share into the Transportation Trust Fund in the form of gasoline taxes.

Several years ago, Governor Christie approved an increase in the gasoline tax to fund transit improvements. The tax amount is adjusted annually to produce a fixed amount of revenue. Most recently the tax was increased by 0.9 cents per gallon to 42.3 cents per gallon, making New Jersey the seventh highest. NJ’s gas tax to rise in October | NJ Spotlight News.

All-electric vehicles of course do not use gas, so their drivers do not pay a gas tax. Hale thinks this is unfair, especially because EVs tend to be heavier than other cars, and he has just the solution: there is a proposal to cut the gas tax by 33%, and Hale suggests that the $150 million that would be lost to the TTF be made up by increasing the annual registration fee for the 123,000 EVs registered in New Jersey by $1,220 a year. If you think that’s fair, ponder these points:

  • Even if heavier vehicles cause more damage to roads in something close to a direct relationship to the weight difference (and this presumes that the TTF merely repairs existing roads and bridges), surely another factor, likely of more significance, is the distance travelled.
  • The 33% cut is just an arbitrary number, at least with regard to Hale’s fairness point. The drivers of the 123,000 EVs (Hale’s figure; I believe this also includes plug-in hybrids) would be paying one-third of the annual TTF levy while the drivers of the other 2,412,248 vehicles registered in New Jersey would pay two-thirds.1 This means that the EV owner is paying, in extra registration fees, just under ten times the amount that the average gasoline-powered car is paying in New Jersey gasoline tax.2 Or put it this way, the $1,220 additional registration fee equates to the tax paid on 2,884 gallons of gasoline (or about 4,305 gallons if the gas tax is actually reduced by 33%).

And none of this considers the environmental benefit from the elimination of tail pipe emissions.3 Governments use tax policy to incentivize certain behaviors all the time.

As a final question about fairness, is it fair that I, who has never been a consumer of the New Jersey public education system, either as a student or parent, should have to pay thousands of dollars a year in school taxes?

Jay Bohn

March 4, 2024

  1. Actually less, because some portion would be paid by out-of-state drivers who purchase gas in New Jersey. ↩︎
  2. I’m mixing statistical sources, so these numbers are not as exact as they seem. The 123,0000 number comes from Hale’s editorial. According to U.S.: total number of cars by state | Statista, based on 2021 numbers, New Jersey had 2,535,248 registered vehicles. I merely subtracted the one from the other. ↩︎
  3. I do realize that the production of electricity to charge EVs does itself have environmental impact, but individual internal combustion engines do pollute more than any public utility. ↩︎