932
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
act as depending on the government's motive for enacting it. The new test is to differentiate between "regulatory legislation that is relatively free of Government self-interest" and "statutes tainted by a governmental object of self-relief." Ante, at 896. We are then elevated to a higher jurisprudential level by reference to the general philosophical principles enunciated in Hurtado v. California, 110 U. S. 516, 535-536 (1884), that "[l]aw . . . must be not a special rule for a particular person or a particular case, but . . . 'the general law . . .' so 'that every citizen shall hold his life, liberty, property and immunities under the protection of the general rules which govern society.' " Surely this marks a bold, if not brash, innovation in the heretofore somewhat mundane law of government contracts; that law is now to be seasoned by an opinion holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not make applicable to the States the requirement that a criminal proceeding be initiated by indictment of a grand jury.
The principal opinion does not tell us, nor do these lofty jurisprudential principles inform us, how we are to decide whether a particular statute is "free of governmental self-interest," on the one hand, or "tainted by" a government objective of "self-relief," on the other. In the normal sense of the word, any tax reform bill which tightens or closes tax loopholes is directed to "government self-relief," since it is designed to put more money into the public coffers. Be the act ever so general in its reform of the tax laws, it apparently would not be a "sovereign act" allowing the Government to defend against a claim by a taxpayer that he had received an interpretation from the Internal Revenue Service that a particular type of income could continue to be treated in accordance with existing statutes or regulations.
But we are told "self-relief" is not, as one might expect, necessarily determined by whether the Government benefited financially from the legislation. For example, in this case the principal opinion acknowledges that we do not know
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