Court Opinion

ID: 9658899
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 21:21:29.541414+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:01.504250
License: Public Domain

Carter, J.,
concurring.
The majority opinion holds that in order for the state Constitution to restrict the plenary power of the Legislature to tax, the language of restriction must be clear.
While the foregoing statement is true, it leaves the inference that any constitutional restriction on the power of the Legislature to tax is a valid one if the restriction is clear. I submit that this is not always so. The power of the state to tax is a sovereign one which cannot be unduly restricted by constitutional provision. If this were not so, a state government could be destroyed by the terms of the very instrument of its creation by denying it the necessary funds on which to operate. The Legislature may provide the means, or no means at all, for the maintenance or destruction of a governmental subdivision whose very existence, is at the sufferance of the Legislature. But the sovereign power of the Legislature to tax takes precedence over a constitutional provision only as to a statewide tax necessary to the very existence of the state; otherwise it would contain the seeds of its own dissolution. It would be a calamity of the greatest magnitude if a constitutional provision provided, or was construed to provide, for the collapse of the very object of its creation. Such a necessity tax is within the plenary power of the Legislature and is supported by the sovereign power growing out of its constitutional creation irrespective of specific constitutional provisions.
White, C. J., and Spencer and Newton, JJ., join in the foregoing concurrence.