Opinion ID: 2060361
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Compensation ClauseDiscrimination ( Chief Judge )

Text: The Chief Judge plaintiffs' Compensation Clause argument is distinctly different from the claims raised by the other litigants. Rather than contending that inflation resulted in the unconstitutional diminution of judicial salaries, they assert that by freezing judicial salaries while repeatedly increasing the salaries of almost all of the remaining 195,000 state employees to keep pace with the cost of living, the State defendants discriminated against the Judiciary in violation of the State Compensation Clause. This argument is premised exclusively on the Supreme Court's holding in Hatter (532 US 557 [2001], supra ), which involved a Social Security tax law that, at the time of its enactment, mandated that all newly-hired federal employees participate in the Social Security program. The law also offered almost all of the then-currently employed federal employees (96%) the option to participate without any additional financial obligation. But it created an exception for the remaining four percent of currently employed federal employees, however, which required members of that classwho contributed to a covered retirement programto participate in the system without any further additional financial obligation. The legislation left those who did not participate in a covered program (i.e., a group consisting almost exclusively of federal judges) without a choice; their financial obligations and payroll deductions would increase as a result of the imposition of the new tax ( id. at 562-564). In finding the law violative of the Federal Compensation Clause as discriminatory against judges, the Hatter court noted that the Social Security legislation was specialin its manner of singling out judges for disadvantageous treatment, in its justification as necessary to offset advantages related to constitutionally protected features of the judicial office, and in the degree of permissible legislative discretion that would have to underlie any determination that the legislation has `equalized' rather than gone too far ( id. at 576). It was these elements that made the Social Security tax distinctly different from a nondiscriminatory tax ( id. ). According to the Chief Judge plaintiffs, just as the Social Security tax law in Hatter imposed a discriminatory tax on the Judiciary, inflation has the same impact on judicial compensation as a tax and, although the failure to remedy it in and of itself may not violate the State Compensation Clause, in this case the Judiciary has been singled out because nearly all of the other 195,000 state employees have received salary increases to compensate in part for inflation. We are unpersuaded that relief is warranted under the Hatter analysis. First, Hatter involved a legislative enactment that discriminated against federal judges by reducing the compensation of judges only; the situation here does not involve any legislative enactment that directly or indirectly diminishes judicial compensation. Second, although other state employees have received adjustments to account for inflation, judges are not the only state employees whose salaries have not been adjusted; the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, members of the Legislature and other constitutional officers have also not received salary increases since 1999. We therefore cannot say that judges have been disadvantaged in a manner comparable to the discriminatory treatment in Hatter . Therefore, Supreme Court properly dismissed this cause of action.