570
Opinion of the Court
Compensation Clause forbids such a tax because the Clause forbids "all diminution," including "taxation," "whether for one purpose or another." Id., at 255. The Federal Circuit relied upon this holding. 64 F. 3d, at 650. But, in our view, it is no longer sound law.
For one thing, the dissenters in Evans cast the majority's reasoning into doubt. Justice Holmes, joined by Justice Brandeis, wrote that the Compensation Clause offers "no reason for exonerating" a judge "from the ordinary duties of a citizen, which he shares with all others. To require a man to pay the taxes that all other men have to pay cannot possibly be made an instrument to attack his independence as a judge." 253 U. S., at 265. Holmes analogized the "diminution" that a tax might bring about to the burden that a state law might impose upon interstate commerce. If "there was no discrimination against such commerce the tax constituted one of the ordinary burdens of government from which parties were not exempted." Id., at 267.
For another thing, this Court's subsequent law repudiated Evans' reasoning. In 1939, 14 years after Miles extended Evans' tax immunity to judges appointed after enactment of the tax, this Court retreated from that extension. See O'Malley, 307 U. S., at 283 (overruling Miles). And in so doing the Court, in an opinion announced by Justice Frankfurter, adopted the reasoning of the Evans dissent. The Court said that the question was whether judges are immune "from the incidences of taxation to which everyone else within the defined classes . . . is subjected." 307 U. S., at 282. Holding that judges are not "immun[e] from sharing with their fellow citizens the material burden of the government," ibid., the Court pointed out that the legal profession had criticized Evans' contrary conclusion, and that courts outside the United States had resolved similar matters differently, 307 U. S., at 281. And the Court concluded that "a non-discriminatory tax laid generally on net income is not, when applied to the income of a federal judge, a diminution
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