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The question of whether the Sixteenth Amendment was properly ratified or not is irrelevant. For the record, On February 24th of 1913 Philander Knox, Secretary of State, proclaimed that the necessary three-fourth of the state legislatures had ratified the Sixteenth Amendment and thus had become a part of law. The idea that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified is promulgated by the so-called "tax protesters" and "frivolous activity non-filers", who belong to a movement started by two men, William J. Benson and Martin J. Beckman who authored the book; The Law that Never Was: The Fraud of the Sixteenth Amendment and Personal Income Tax. This book and it's ideas were featured in a documentary called Freedom to Fascism directed by Aaron Russo. The problem with these so-called "tax protesters" and their argument that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified is that even if that were true, which it appears not to be, it would not change the meaning or intent of the Sixteenth Amendment.

As well intended as "tax protesters" may be, and they deserve a presumption of innocence from everyone, as is their right, the problem with many of their arguments is they misunderstand or misinterpret the meaning of the laws they instinctively, perhaps even inherently, understand to be dubious. There is much that is dubious about Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code and there is certainly much that is dubious about the tax collectors who seem to so gleefully destroy the lives of everyday, hardworking, Americans. As Gladstone once said, the problem with income tax is that it tends to make a nation of liars. It doesn't take a legal expert to understand that the income tax laws in the United States are an odious and confusing pile of pages that make so little sense to far too few, that cottage industries of accounting and tax law professionals has flourished because of these dubious revenue laws.

That there is a growing number of "tax protesters" makes sense, as the United States is, after all, a nation founded on tax revolt. The problem with "tax-protesters", which can't be stressed often enough, is their willingness to make legal arguments that have no foundation or relevance to their own liability. The belief that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified serves as an excellent example. The primary premise behind this belief is that the 16th Amendment "authorized" the federal government to collect income taxes without having to apportion the tax among the several states according to population. Tax protesters are not the only ones that hold this belief, in fact, most federal employees, elected officials and even lawyers and judges hold this belief. But, does the Sixteenth Amendment "authorize" Congress to lay and collect tax on income with out regard to apportionment? A simple reading of the Amendment should help:

The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

After reading this it would appear as if Congress is "authorizing" themselves the ability to pass income tax laws on income with out apportionment. But, anyone who understands basic principles of constitutional taxation knows, Congress all ready had the power to lay an collect taxes on income without apportionment and had all ready done so earlier in the United States history.

Because the cost of the Civil War was taking its financial toll on the federal government, Congress passed a direct, apportioned tax on income in 1861, but the taxes imposed by that revenue law were never collected because the Revenue Act of 1862 superseded it, which passed an income tax, not apportioned as an excise tax instead. The Act of 1862 passed a graduated tax which was easier to impose than the headache of apportionment and in 1866 the federal government collected more than 310 million dollars which was the highest amount ever collected in the United States 90 year history. A decade later, in 1872, Congress repealed the tax and went back to collecting revenues from taxing the manufacture and importation of tobacco and distilled products. But, before that happened a man by the name of William M. Springer challenged the constitutionality of the income tax, claiming that tax on income was a direct tax on property and as such subject to the rule of apportionment.

Before getting to know what the Supreme Court held in the Springer ruling it is important first to understand the very basic laws of taxation under the Constitution of the United States. First, it is important to know that it is Congress that has the complete and plenary power of taxation and can tax what ever is taxable. The power to tax was granted by Article I Section 8, clause 1. and states:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

While it is Congress that has this complete and unquestionable power of taxation, they are expressly forbidden to tax exports. This is found in Article I Section 9, clause 5 and states:

No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State.

Along with what has been prohibited in terms of taxation, the Constitution also lays down two rules by which to govern imposition of the two classes listed. Direct taxes are subject to the rule of apportionment and indirect taxes subject to the rule of geographical uniformity. These rules can be found, respectively in Articles I Section 2, clause 3 and Article I Section 9, clause 4 which state:

Article I section 2 clause 3 states:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned amongst the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.

Article I section 9 clause 4 states:

No capitation, or other direct tax, shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken.

Springer had made a number of contentions regarding the Acts of 1862 and 1864 and The Supreme Court agreed with a few of his contentions but soundly rejected the view that the income tax was a direct tax and therefore subject to apportionment. What the Springer Court held was that the Acts of 1862 and 1864 were excise taxes and not subject to the rule of apportionment. The historical point of Springer is that Congress obviously had the "authority" to lay and collect taxes on income either as a direct tax, such as the one passed in 1861, or as an indirect tax such as the acts of 1862 and 1864.

So then, if Congress all ready had the power to collect income taxes, why then did they feel the need to pass the Sixteenth Amendment? The answer to that lies in the next income tax Congress tried to pass with the Revenue Acts of 1894. This tax was immediately challenged as unconstitutional and this time the Supreme Court agreed. In Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co. the Supreme Court struck down the entire portion of the income tax of the revenue laws of 1894 as unconstitutional because it viewed that particular income tax as a direct tax not apportioned and therefore in direct conflict with the Constitution.

Congress, however, had not intended to pass a direct tax on income and was more than a little perplexed by the Pollock ruling. This was the impetus for the Sixteenth Amendment. Of course, a different view of history also suggest that plenty of law makers did want to be able to tax income directly with out having to deal with the headache of apportionment, but it should be assumed that the Revenue Act was written in good faith to work within the confines of the Constitution.

Even so, years later, William Howard Taft, then President of the United States is reported to have sent Congress a memo suggesting an Amendment be written to get around the rule of apportionment. This was June 16th of 1909. The following day, on June 17th a Senator Norris Brown introduced Senate Joint Resolution 39 which stated:

The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect direct taxes on incomes without apportionment among the several States according to population.

The problems with the wording of an Amendment written as such were clear and even a junior Senator was able to realize the legal problems with such an Amendment. The language clearly sought to destroy one part of the Constitution, bringing its own part into irreconcilable conflict with the Constitution. A Senator by the name of Nelson Aldrich, no junior Senator this one, stepped in and offered to write the Amendment and on June 28th he introduced Senate Joint Resolution 40 and with it the Sixteenth Amendment was born. Let's look at Senator Aldrich's crafty and very clever language once more:

The Sixteenth Amendment, authored by Senator Nelson Aldrich, states:

The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

What Congress was really up to when legislating the Sixteenth Amendment is not so clear, that so many people then and today believe that that Amendment granted Congress the power to tax income without any regard to apportionment is understandable. Indeed, it should be clear from the Springer ruling and even earlier Supreme Court rulings that the issue of income taxation is confusing for all. The Springer ruling relied heavily upon references from the Federalist Papers quoting all three authors in Hamilton, Madison and Jay on the matter of taxation and the issue of direct and indirect taxation. The confusion becomes confounded when the Supreme court rulings made on the issues of taxation get misrepresented. There is a belief that the Pollock Court overruled the Springer Court or at the very least "modified" the Springer ruling. But, the Pollock Court did no such thing, but rather, distinguished their ruling form the Springer ruling. What that means is that because all cases are decided by the facts of the case, every ruling is made by the very narrow facts of the case, and in the case of Pollock the very narrow facts of the case were separate from those in Springer, and therefore the Pollock Court was making a separate ruling on a separate issue.

The confusion only got worse once the constitutionality of the Sixteenth Amendment made its way to the Supreme Court and in two seminal rulings, Brushaber v. Union Pacific and Stanton v. Baltic Mining, both parties challenging the Sixteenth Amendment clearly believed that Amendment was "authorizing" a direct tax on income with out any need for apportionment. In both cases the Supreme Court disagreed, yet astonishingly, most who even know of the Brushaber ruling, (very few even seem to know about Stanton), most seem to believe that the Brushaber Court declared the 16th Amendment a bill authorizing Congress to impose income taxes directly but relieved of the rule of apportionment. This is not at all what the Brushaber Court ruled and could have never made such a ruling and still be taken seriously as Supreme Court Judges.

It is unclear exactly how people came to believe that Chief Justice White who delivered the rulings in both cases, said that the Sixteenth Amendment authorized a federal tax on income without regard to apportionment. Case law can be tedious and somewhat complicated to read, but a careful reading of the Brushaber ruling makes it difficult to know why people think the ruling said anything other than what it said. To be fair, Chief Justice White does go on about Brushaber's contentions and perhaps long enough that these contentions seem to be White's contentions, but the reader would have to be guilty of not paying attention to what they are reading to conclude that the Supreme Court ruled that the Sixteenth Amendment did away with the rule of apportionment.

The language of Brushaber is clear enough and when Chief Justice White states in the Stanton Ruling:

By the previous ruling (Brushaber) it was settled that the Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the very beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged...

Any confusions brought about by the language of the Brushaber ruling should be easily cleared up. In both Brushaber and Stanton the Supreme Court held that no new power of taxation was created by the 16th Amendment. In Brushaber, Chief Justice White is clear in his explanation of why the Amendment did not do that:

But it clearly results that the propositions and the conditions under it, if acceded to, would cause one provision of the Constitution to destroy another; that is, they would result in bringing the provisions of the Amendment exempting a direct tax from apportionment into irreconcilable conflict with the general requirement that all taxes be apportioned . Moreover, the tax authorized by the Amendment, being direct, would not come under the rule of uniformity applicable under the Constitution to other than direct taxes, and thus it would come to pass that the result of the Amendment would be to authorize a particular direct tax not subject either to apportionment or to the rule of geographical uniformity, thus giving power to impose a different tax in State or States than was levied in another State or States. This result instead of simplifying the situation and making clear the limitation on the taxing power, which obviously the Amendment must have intended to accomplish, would create radical and destructive changes in our constitutional system and multiply confusion.

In other words, the Court has said that if the Sixteenth Amendment actually authorized a direct tax without apportionment as Mr. Brushaber believed then and many people believe now, the belief is erroneous because it would cause one provision of the Constitution to destroy another; bringing one part of the Constitution into irreconcilable conflict with the general requirement that all direct taxes be apportioned. The Brushaber Court ruled that the Sixteenth Amendment did not do that. The Brushaber Court never ruled that the Sixteenth Amendment authorized an unapportioned direct tax on income. That court recognized such an Amendment would alter or abolish another section of the Constitution and would necessarily have to be stuck down as unconstitutional. The Sixteenth Amendment was upheld because it does not do what most seem to think it does, it instead, as Chief Justice White puts it:

The contention that the Amendment treats a tax on income as a direct tax although it is relieved of the rule of apportionment and is necessarily therefore not subject to the rule of uniformity as such rule only applies to taxes which are not direct, thus destroying the two great classifications which have been recognized and enforced from the beginning, is wholly with out foundation...

And goes on to say:

Indeed, from another point of view, the Amendment demonstrates that no such purpose was intended and on the contrary shows that it was drawn with the object of maintaining the limitations of the Constitution and harmonizing their operation.

Whatever Congress was really up to when they wrote the Sixteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court upheld the Amendment as wholly Constitutional on the basis that no new power of taxation was created, nor was any part of the Constitution altered or abolished by this Amendment. In fact, the Court acknowledged that the Amendment, instead of working contrary to the Constitution, works in "harmony" with it and a careful reading of that Amendment shows that indeed it does.

What both the Brushaber and Stanton rulings explain is that the Amendment is intended to correct any erroneous interpretations of future Revenue Laws with an income tax that has not been apportioned. The Courts, indeed, the People, are prohibited from viewing any non-apportioned income tax as a direct tax and must necessarily, by law, view the tax as an indirect tax not subject to the rule of apportionment. This is the meaning and intent of the Sixteenth Amendment.

Whether or not the Sixteenth Amendment was properly ratified is wholly irrelevant because even if it was never properly ratified it doesn't change the way federal income taxation works under the Constitution. The question of whether an non apportioned income tax is an indirect or direct tax has been settled. The current tax imposed on income is not a direct tax but an excise tax that taxes a "happening" or an "event' or some particular taxed activity. To make a legal argument in defense of some sort of "failure to file a valid tax return" or other such charge by asserting that the Sixteenth Amendment was never properly is just a long winded way of accepting liability for the tax in question.

The Sixteenth Amendments only relevance in terms of question of liability is that the tax in question must be viewed as an excise tax imposed upon some kind of taxed activity. The taxed activity would then be the subject of the tax. If the income tax were a direct tax the subject of the tax would be income, but since the "Personal Income Tax Laws" are indirect taxes because they are not apportioned among the several states, then the subject of the tax can not be income. Income is merely what is used to measure how much is owed. The subject would necessarily have to be some taxed activity. If someone is liable for an income tax under the Title 26, then there would have to be a specific section that clearly states what taxed activity is being taxed, and in terms of tobacco and alcohol, there are clear, concise sections that make perfectly clear what taxed activity is being taxed and who is liable, few that they are. For the vast majority of people currently swearing under penalty of perjury that they are indeed liable for the "Personal Income Tax", they rely upon the tax that was imposed upon taxable income. Do you understand?

Imposing a tax on taxable income is like building a house out of a house or making a cake from a cake. What is taxable income? Taxable income has a very specific definition with in the tax code that leads us to other words that need to be defined such as gross income or adjusted gross income, taxable year and taxpayer. All come with specific legal definitions within the code. In the end, the tax imposed upon taxable income is a marvel of circumlocution, so circular in it's definitions that it is doubtful that anyone can truly understand the intent of such a law. But that is an entirely different issue.

The issue of whether or not the 16th Amendment was properly ratified, in terms of a legal defense, is a red herring and just bad legal strategy. When someone is charged with some sort of "tax evasion" charges such as "failure to file" or other such charges, the question the defendant should be asking is not whether the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified but rather, is the defendant truly liable for the tax to begin with? By asking the prosecution to prove jurisdiction and prove the defendant is liable, the burden of proof is where it belongs, with the prosecution. But, when some one makes the assertion they are not liable to the income tax because the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified then the burden of proof is shifted and it is incumbent upon the party asserting it to prove it. That is, of course, if a judge even allows such an argument to be argued and doesn't dismiss it as just another frivolous argument made by the "tax protester" movement. It must be noted that virtually all of the above fits into "tax protestor" type arguments which makes one liable for treble damages for even suggesting them in Court. They are all very poor arguments, disproven so many times that all are tired of hearing them. Albeit, all wish they were even slightly true. Lets be very clear - a contention that others haven't read and understand the Code and Laws, but this guy has...is beyond absurd,and even offensive. In my 30 years of practice, after many, many years of education, and even work on writing some tax legislation....of all the thousands of lawyers, thousands scholars and politicians, thousands upon thousands more of their family, parents, office people, children, judges, various government employees, etc., all that work with the laws daily, write them, read them, and have all the same motivations as you and me, (to pay as little tax as possible, and many to earn big fee's by showing others how to do so)..NONE COME TO CONCLUSION THAT THE ONE ABOVE HAS. Maybe none are as bright, maybe none are as well versed, maybe none care about their children, parents, themselves, etc. enough to actually want to make the arguments for them he seems to feel are so clear...and be able to not pay their tax fairly conventionally.....you decide.

rebuttal: What should be noted is that the above rebuttal makes no effort to address the points made in the original answer. This "expert" is so tired of hearing the original answer he or she can't even be bothered to address what has been spoken to. As he or she claims, these arguments have been made before and "disproven." But did that person offer one single piece of evidence to make that case? If people are so tired of hearing about it then why did the questioner ask the question.

Furthermore, and for the record, no tax has been "protested" on this page. What were offered were facts, facts that the following answer tacitly agrees to by refusing to offer any explanation or rebuttal other than character assassination and a weak and laughable appeal to authority. It should be clear for anyone who has read Brushaber and Stanton that this so called "expert" of thirty years of practice has not even bothered to read Brushaber or Stanton, otherwise he would not claim in capitalized letters that "NONE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT THE ONE ABOVE HAS". It was the Supreme Court that made the CONCLUSION and someone with "30 years" of experience in the field should know better. Rather than be offended by the contention that you don't understand the Code, why not take the time to explain it? Take my contentions, or more appropriately the Supreme Courts contentions and rebut them point by point, rather than rely upon empty rhetoric that does nothing to inform or answer the question. You are offended because I answered this question to the best of my ability and your answer does not even speak to the question it speaks to my answer.

Lastly, the "rebuttal" offered by this expert of 30 years is the same cut and paste answer he has applied to several answers I have offered in terms of income taxation. Each question I answered was a different question that deserved different answers, of which I gave. But in each of those answers the above answerer offers one cookie cutter rebuttal, with slight variances in some, for each answer. The attitude put out by this 30 year expert is the same attitude put out by many in our government today. While paying taxes is the law and those who don't pay the taxes they owe are guilty of a crime, if someone determines they are not liable and demand proof of jurisdiction this is not a criminal act and anyone who would try to stop an individual from challenging jurisdiction would be guilty of obstruction of justice which is a much more serious crime. If I am so wrong and so arrogant then prove it. Take the time to address what has been spoken to, if you can. One would think with 30 years of experience that you could. Here's my point. Whether you're looking at the Sixteenth Amendment, or the original Constitution, it is only Congress (aka, the Legislative Branch of the Federal Government) that is granted the power to collect income taxes. But who does the actual collection? It's the IRS, which is part of the Executive Branch, not the Legislative Branch. Therefore, whether the income tax itself is Constitutional or not, the way it is collected is unquestionably UNconstitutional. The Executive Branch has no Constitutional authority to collect income taxes, and the Legislative Branch has no Constitutional authority to pass off its Constitutional authority to another branch. Looks to me like the IRS owes the people a huge income tax refund. My (very rough) calculations put it at somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 trillion. You can just direct-deposit my share - you already have my bank routing number and account number. Thanks.

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14y ago
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9y ago

The 16th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified by the requisite state on February 3, 1913. It was eventually ratified by 42 of the 48 states in 1913.Four states rejected it and two never considered it.

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14y ago

1913 in practice, although it was not actually properly ratified.

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11y ago

Unanimity among the States as to a proposed Amendment has never been a requirement of the Amending Formula.

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12y ago

yes it has, to allow men to have brutal sex sessions with ducklings

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12y ago

Nope

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Q: Has the 16th amendment been changed?
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