The John Adams Courthouse in Boston.

A POPULAR PROPOSAL to lower the Massachusetts state income tax rate is tied up in a legal challenge at the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. The complaint is political posturing, not legal substance.

The proposal itself is straightforward: reduce the state income tax rate from 5 percent to 4 percent over the course of three years. The lawsuit challenging it was brought by labor-backed opponents who have objected to the measure from the very beginning. Their goal is to squash the proposal before it makes it to the ballot.

The lawsuit does not argue the tax cut is unconstitutional, economically unsound, or harmful to the public. Instead, the entire case rests on a technical objection to how the attorney general’s office summarized the initiative for the ballot.

The Massachusetts Constitution requires the attorney general to prepare a “fair, concise summary” of each ballot question. This summary appears on the ballot to help voters understand the main features of the proposal.

Opponents of the income tax cut claim the attorney general’s summary of the question should have explicitly stated that a secondary outcome of lowering the income tax rate would be to lower taxes on long-term capital gains income.

But neither logic nor law require ballot summaries to catalog every downstream impact of a proposal.

The attorney general’s argument is simple. The initiative clearly states that it would lower the state’s tax rate on income from wages, salaries, interest, and dividends. Massachusetts currently taxes long-term capital gains income at the same statutory rate as income on wages and salaries. But capital gains are not separately targeted or uniquely altered under the measure. Therefore, they need not be mentioned in the summary.

Massachusetts case law supports the attorney general’s position. In 2016, in Hensley v. Attorney General, the court ruled that ballot summaries “cannot, and should not, attempt to describe all the elements of a proposed measure.”

The court recognized an obvious reality: A ballot summary cannot simultaneously be concise and exhaustively detailed.

The reason opponents are focused on capital gains is political, not legal.

Instead of spending millions campaigning against the measure, labor leaders believe they have a more expedient path to stopping the policy before voters have their say. It’s a long-used but rarely successful tactic. In the early 1980s, the Massachusetts Teachers Association mounted a similar legal challenge to another tax reform, Proposition 2½. That case firmly established the precedent that ballot language may remain in place even if it is potentially confusing, so long as it is not deemed likely to significantly mislead voters.

According to legal filings in the current case, the court has not kept a measure off the ballot due to its summary in almost a century. To do so now would disenfranchise the tens of thousands of people who petitioned to advance this ballot question, as well as the millions of voters who will eventually weigh in on it. 

Massachusetts voters are fully capable of understanding this proposal’s basic purpose – to reduce their tax burden. The groundswell of public support for the measure suggests they already do.

Recent polling from Emerson College shows 62 percent of voters support the income tax cut. Additional polling from the Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance, a nonprofit coalition of business leaders, trade groups, and think tanks backing the measure, indicates the policy is popular across stakeholder groups, including 82 percent of union members, 78 percent of teachers, and 78 percent of small business owners, who said a lower tax rate would help them hire more employees.

Removing the initiative from the ballot just because critics object to the phrasing of a summary could undermine public confidence in the initiative process itself. 

The court is not debating the merits of lowering the income tax rate. That decision belongs to the voters. The court’s role is only to determine whether the ballot summary fairly explains the proposal. Under both common sense and longstanding court precedent, it plainly does. 

Robert Cordy is a retired associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. He serves on the board of directors of the Pioneer New England Legal Foundation.