| QUOTE |
| The railroad was being sued by the county for back taxes. The railroad claimed six different defenses. The specifics are not important, because the central concern is whether the court ruled on the Fourteenth Amendment issue. As will be shown below, the Supreme Court’s decision clearly says it did not. But to put the railroad’s complaint in perspective, consider this: On property with a $30 million mortgage, the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000. (That’s like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it ... and taking the case to the Supreme Court.) One of the railroad’s defenses was that when the state assessed the value of the railroad’s property, it accidentally included the value of the fences along the right-of-way. The county, not the state, should have assessed the fences. So the railroad withheld all its taxes. Yes, this is an exceedingly picayune distinction. All the tax was still due to Santa Clara County; the railroad didn’t dispute that. But they said the wrong assessor assessed the fences - a tiny fraction of the whole amount - so they refused to pay any of the tax, and they fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And as it happens, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed: ...the entire assessment is a nullity, upon the ground that the state board of equalization included ... property [the fences] which it was without jurisdiction to assess for taxation... The Court rejected the county’s appeal, and that was the end of it. Except for one thing. One of the railroad’s six defenses involved the Fourteenth Amendment. As it happens, since the case was decided based on the fence issue, the railroad didn’t need those extra defenses, and none of them was ever decided by the court. But one of them - related to the Fourteenth Amendment - still crept into the written record, even though the Court specifically did not rule on it. Here’s how the matter unfolded. First the railroad’s defense. The treatment that the railroad claimed was unfair In the Fourteenth Amendment part of their defense, the railroad said: That the provisions of the constitution and laws of California ... are in violation of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, in so far as they require the assessment of their property at its full money value, without making deduction, as in the case of railroads [that are only] operated in one county, and of other corporations, and of natural persons, for the value of the mortgages ...(Emphasis added) The italic portions say, in essence, “The state is taxing us railroads on the whole value of our property, instead of deducting our mortgage the way people do. That’s not fair. Nobody else gets taxed that way.” The implication, of course, is that the state has no right to decide that corporations get different tax rates than humans. And the railroad was using the former slaves’ Equal Protection clause (the Fourteenth Amendment) as its shield. |
