officers who seem not to have understood that the supreme assurance of due process (US Const, Ams 5, 14; Mich Const 1908, art 2, § 16; Mich Const 1963, art 1, § 17) applies to the deprivation of property as well as to life and liberty; that no attorney general is either duty bound or possessed of legal or moral right to suspend for years a statutory command that the appointed statutory administrator (a) give "prompt" consideration to the timely written request of a corporate taxpayer for redetermination of its timely paid annual franchise fee and (b) "promptly redetermine" that fee, and that the injustice of justice delayed purposely is deserving of stern judicial censure no matter who the perpetrator or perpetrators thereof may be. This Court's experience with what had already become a litigiously disgraceful vendetta goes back to January 7, 1960 and June 8, 1960, the respective dates of submission of Detroit Edison Company v. Corporation Securities Commission, 361 Mich. 150, and Detroit Edison Company v. State, 361 Mich. 290. At issue here were the respective amounts of Detroit Edison's 1956 and 1958 corporate franchise fees.

Stimulated by no judicial bravos, the present attorney general has — for this latest Edison Case — delivered an errant encore of that aria buffa which, nearly a decade ago, his predecessor chanted before a not very enthusiastic Court. See what we have come to know as the second Edison Case ( Detroit Edison Company v. State, 361 Mich. 290, decided September 16, 1960). The attorney general intoned then, and Attorney General Kelley chants now, that the remedy of review before the corporation tax appeal board (provided by PA 1921, No 85, as amended by PA 1954, No 153; CLS 1961, § 450.309 [Stat Ann 1963 Rev § 21.210]) was and is exclusive; the 1959 official crescendo having been that "jurisdiction is lodged exclusively in the corporation tax appeal board pursuant to PA 1921, No 85, as amended."

Corporation Securities Commission v. Michigan Consolidated Gas Company (1967), 7 Mich. App. 552. It has been before this Court in variantly sulphurous phases since 1960 ( Detroit Edison Company v. Corporation Securities Commission, 361 Mich. 150; Detroit Edison Company v. State, 361 Mich. 290) and requires no expatiation. For a recent summary of details, see Corporation Securities Commission v. American Motors Corporation ( Appeal re Detroit Edison Company) (1967), 379 Mich. 531, 538-550.

If Alcoa were to make payment after thus protesting, we are confident their payment would be treated as voluntary. Detroit Edison Co. v. State, 361 Mich. 290, 105 N.W.2d 227 (1960); Spoon-Shacket Co. v. Oakland County, 356 Mich. 151, 97 N.W.2d 25 (1959). In Michigan, the payment of an alleged illegal tax under protest is voluntary payment and not recoverable.

Thus if it was right for the State to urge, as it did successfully in the Hoskins Case, that "the State is justified in holding that the tax is determined from the corporate books" (p 596), so it is right for this claimant to urge that the defendant commission is bound by the same rule (in the absence of course of the presently absent factor of "fraud or mistake"). Like its tax-payers, the State "must be honest." (For source of this regularly repeated quotation, see Detroit Edison Co. v. State, 361 Mich. 290 at 292.) The defendant commission and each corporate taxpayer has (or should have) a continued right to depend on the precedent of Hoskins until and unless the legislature wills to the contrary.