SCOTUS Revives Third-Country Deportations, Jack Smith Faces the Senate & Why California's Wealth-Tax Critics Miss the Mark

This Day in Legal History: The Integration of Ole Miss

On September 30, 1962, James Meredith, a Black Air Force veteran, was escorted onto the campus of the University of Mississippi by federal marshals to enroll under a federal court order. The university had rejected him for no reason other than his race. The Fifth Circuit ordered him admitted, and Justice Hugo Black refused to let that order be delayed. Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, personally blocked Meredith’s registration anyway. The federal appeals court held him in contempt.

After nightfall on the 30th, a crowd of students, locals, and segregationists attacked the roughly 120 marshals guarding Meredith. That night President Kennedy went on national television to explain why the federal government would enforce the order, the address today’s opening quote comes from. The riot killed two people, including a French journalist, and injured hundreds. It took thousands of federal troops to end it. The next morning, Meredith registered.

Listeners may remember we covered Little Rock earlier this month. Ole Miss is the same principle five years later: a federal court order is binding, even on a state determined to resist it, and the federal government will enforce it. The Constitution’s guarantees mean what courts say they mean, and a governor doesn’t get to veto them. That idea of judicial orders as binding law, not suggestions, has come up again and again on this show this month.

The Supreme Court has let the administration resume deporting migrants to so-called third countries: nations that aren’t named in their removal orders and that many of them have no connection to. In a brief order, with the three liberal justices objecting, the Court paused a February ruling by a federal district judge. That ruling required immigration authorities to give people more due process before sending them to a third country, and a federal appeals court had largely upheld it earlier this month. The administration says it has used the policy to deport tens of thousands of people to Mexico and to countries in Africa and Latin America, often after their home countries refused to take them back. The legal issue is notice and an opportunity to be heard. The challengers argue that if the government plans to send someone to a country where they may face persecution or torture, due process and the Convention Against Torture require that the person be told where they’re going and get a real chance to object first. The government’s position is that it has broad authority over removals and that lower courts overstepped. The Court also agreed to hear the case in full in December, and it asked the parties to brief several questions: whether the lower courts had jurisdiction at all, whether they could order nationwide relief, and whether the policy violates due process or the torture convention. Those first two questions matter well beyond immigration, because they go to the reach of federal judges’ power over executive policy. For now, the deportations resume while those questions are decided. As with the SAVE voter-verification order last week, the emergency docket has put the risk of error on the people affected while the case is pending.

Supreme Court lets Trump resume third-country deportations | Reuters · NPR · CBS News

Former special counsel Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing its Republican chairman, Chuck Grassley, titled an oversight hearing into Smith’s “abuse of authority.” Smith brought the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump: one over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and one over his handling of classified documents after his first term. Both cases were dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election. Grassley accused Smith of “rampant abuse of authority and political targeting” funded by taxpayers. Smith defended the investigations as based on evidence and Justice Department policy, not politics. He told senators he would not be silenced by “continued threats of prosecution,” and he condemned the firing and vilification of the agents and prosecutors who worked for him. Live coverage also reported him saying his investigation had shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump engaged in serious crimes. Here’s the legal significance. A special counsel operates under Justice Department regulations designed to give some independence in politically sensitive investigations. When a former prosecutor faces open talk of prosecution for his own charging decisions, and his former staff are fired, the concern is less about Smith himself than about future prosecutors. Every prosecutor considering a case against a powerful person will now know that the charging decision itself can bring personal and professional consequences. Congress does have legitimate oversight power over the Justice Department. But oversight turning into retaliation is exactly what Justice Department independence norms are supposed to prevent. The hearing is another sign of how politicized federal prosecution has become.

Former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith faces Senate hearing over abuse of authority accusations | Reuters · NBC News · CNN

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on one of the most common arguments against California’s proposed wealth tax. Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of Californians who were billionaires at the start of this year. Opponents warn that a tax on the ultra-rich will eventually trickle down to ordinary households. My response is that ordinary households already pay a recurring tax on their largest store of wealth. It’s called the property tax. Think about how it works: the government values an asset you own, applies a rate to that value, and bills you every year simply for continuing to own it. That’s a tax on a stock of wealth, not on income. I ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers using Tax Foundation and Federal Reserve data. The national effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes was about 0.91% in 2022. The median primary residence was worth about $323,000, and median housing equity was about $200,000. That works out to a property tax bill of roughly $2,900 a year, or close to 1.5% of the typical homeowner’s actual equity, every year. And unlike Proposition 40, the property tax doesn’t subtract your mortgage. It’s charged on the full assessed value, so with a big mortgage, a nominal 1% rate can equal 5% or more of your real equity. The billionaire’s wealth tax would be calculated on assets minus debts, which is more lenient on that point. My conclusion is that many homeowners would gladly trade their recurring 1.5% for a one-time 5%. So the real question isn’t whether taxing wealth is acceptable in principle. It’s why our appetite for it changes so much depending on what kind of wealth it is and who owns it. I’m not saying Proposition 40 is well designed. Valuing private company shares is much harder than valuing a house, and billionaires can move in a way houses can’t. If the objection is really to the size and one-time structure, the better debate is whether a recurring, lower-rate tax, say 1% a year above a very high threshold, would be workable. That would look much more like the property tax system homeowners already live with, and over ten years it would raise roughly double the revenue.

California Wealth Tax Trickle-Down Concerns Are Unconvincing | Bloomberg Tax