Cite as: 532 U. S. 557 (2001)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
Clause into a Discrimination Clause can explain a contrary conclusion.
And this, of course, is what has been achieved by the targeted extension of the Medicare tax to federal employees who were previously exempt. It may well be that, in some abstract sense, they are not being "discriminated against," since they end up being taxed like other citizens; but this does not alter the fact that, since exemption from the tax was part of their employment package—since they had an employment expectation of a preferential exemption from taxation—their compensation was being reduced. One of the benefits of being a federal judge (or any federal employee) had, prior to 1982, been an exemption from the Medicare tax. This benefit Congress took away, much as a private employer might terminate a contractual commitment to pay Medicare taxes on behalf of its employees. The latter would clearly be a cut in compensation, and so is the former.2 Had Congress simply imposed the Medicare tax on its own employees (including judges) at the time it introduced that tax for other working people, no benefit of federal employment would have been reduced, because, with respect to the newly introduced tax, none had ever existed. But an extension to federal employees of a tax from which they had previously been exempt by reason of their employment status seems to me a flat-out reduction of federal employment compensation.
2 As the Court explains, the purpose of the Medicare tax extension was to ensure that federal workers "bear a more equitable share of the costs of financing the benefits to which many of them eventually became entitled" by reason of their own or their spouses' private-sector employment. Ante, at 561 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). As with the Social Security tax, therefore, the Medicare tax aspect of this case does not present the situation in which a tax exemption has been eliminated in return for some other benefit, different in kind but equivalent in value. Cf. ante, at 573 ("[P]articipation in Social Security as judges would benefit only a minority").
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