Make New York Post a Preferred Source Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Kathy Hochul and Kamar H. Samuels attend an event to bring NYC Public Schools procurement into the 21st century in New York, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026. Camara Porter/AdMedia/MediaPunch/Shutterstock The unfolding court drama over New York City’s pied-à-terre tax isn’t just about billionaires. It’s about fundamental rights of all Americans.
New York’s Democratic Party is trashing those rights and violating the legal principles that underpin America’s successful economy in order to finance their socialist spending spree.
Between elections, we must go to court in defense of these rights and fight hard.
On Tuesday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Wayne Ozzi ruled that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rollout of the pied-à-terre tax deprived homeowners of their due process rights.
The city had notified some 17,000 house- and apartment-owners that they owed the tax and had a mere 30 days to prove otherwise — or be hit with hefty penalties.
It was flipping the burden of proof onto homeowners to show their property is their primary residence and exempt from the tax.
Ozzi ordered the city to redo the rollout, this time honoring property owners’ due-process rights.
But City Hall is standing pat, vowing to appeal rather than clean up its act.
A Mamdani spokesman huffed, “The ultra-wealthy are fighting in court to avoid paying their fair share. They have filed lawsuit after lawsuit to protect their privilege, and we will not back down.”’
“Privilege” is the wrong word; “rights” is the correct one, and they belong to all of us.
This week, former US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and casino magnate Steve Wynn sued, challenging the tax itself, not just the rollout, and a group of real-estate owners filed an almost identical suit. (Full disclosure: I was married to Ross from 1995 to 1998.)
Both suits argue the tax violates both the US and New York constitutions and must be struck down entirely.
On the merits, these suits aren’t slam dunks, but pretty close.
Yet Gov. Kathy Hochul’s spokesperson sneers, “When Steve Wynn and Wilbur Ross try to cast themselves as sympathetic figures in a fight over paying their fair share on multimillion-dollar second homes, they’re making the case for the pied-à-terre tax as well as anyone could.”
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Translation: Only “sympathetic figures” are entitled to due process and other constitutional protections.
That’s a frightening prospect — the reverse of what this nation has always stood for.
Ross and Wynn argue the tax violates the US Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause and Privileges and Immunities Clause by discriminating against nonresidents who own a home here.
The Constitution bars states from imposing penalties on residents of other states.
It’s a winning argument: In 2000, the New York State Court of Appeals struck down the NYC “commuter tax” for doing that very thing.
The US Supreme Court has voided several state laws that unconstitutionally deprived nonresidents of their rights, including a New Hampshire law that tried to exclude nonresidents from practicing law there, a South Carolina law that tried to charge shrimp fishermen from other states a higher license fee than in-state fishermen and an Alaska law compelling employers to give preferences to in-state job applicants.
In 2015, the court struck down a Maryland law that imposed a tax disadvantage on out-of-state businesses; Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, argued this was the “Balkanization” the framers wanted to prevent.
Technically, New York’s pied-à-terre law taxes residential properties that are not a primary residence, regardless of where the owner lives, but Hochul, Mamdani and the other pols who pushed the tax to fill the city’s coffers have defended it as a tax on outsiders — just what the Constitution prohibits.
Again and again Hochul said about pied-à-terre owners, “They’re part of our skyline, but these people are not part of our city.”
She defended the tax as affecting “out-of-towners.”
The lawsuits also nail Hochul and Democratic legislators for their sleazy attempt to evade the state Constitution’s 2.5% cap on how much city real estate can be taxed in any one year by calling the pied-à-terre tax a “surcharge” instead.
Call it what you want, if the government is taking money out of your pocket, it’s a tax.
These lawsuits should succeed on the merits, but sadly the state’s judiciary — including the Court of Appeals — has become a rubber-stamping arm of the far-left Democratic Party.
That’s why we are plagued with so many “let ’em loose” judges.
If the suits fail there, the litigants should head straight into federal court, where they are likely to prevail.
The pied-à-terre tax was tacked on to the state budget at the last minute without a thought as to whether it was legal or prudent, and then it was rolled out even more recklessly.
The lesson for all New Yorkers from this pied-à-terre fiasco is that Mandani’s out-of-control spending is fueling an avaricious hunt for money from whoever has it, the law be damned.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
