"It's so simple, it's ridiculous": taxing times for 16th amendment rebels

Reason, May, 2004 by Brian Doherty

To his mind, and those of the 200 gathered at the conference, they are doing everything an American citizen needs to do when faced with injustice: using every legal, reasonable means to seek a redress. The Constitution will not defend itself, Schulz tells me; it is just a piece of paper. Keeping it healthy requires bold action, often expensive and time-consuming action, from those who love it.

After Lane gives his presentation about the redress of grievances suit, with its announcement that parties to the suit intend to withhold their cooperation with the income tax until the questions are answered, a sour-voiced, heavyset woman toward the back is appalled. No one owes the tax, she exclaims, so what kind of weapon is that to hold over the government's head, withholding something that wasn't even due in the first place?

In his role as general MC for the conference, Schulz is clearly wearied by the obsessions of some of his audience members--for example, the notion that hiring an attorney means abandoning personal sovereignty before the law, or that having a yellow-fringed flag in a room means you are under martial law. But he is generally polite about it, if in a pained way. He tries to explain to the woman that lots of people are paying, and that they were seeking to enjoin the ms from enforcing any tax liabilities on them until the petition is answered.

Sessions at the three-day conference often run late--through lunch and into the evening, past the announced closing time--and the crowds stay through it all. I meet computer industry workers, violin makers, and even ex-IRS agents, from all across the country; they are overwhelmingly white, about two-thirds male, and mostly between 30 and 60 years old. Their comportment and appearance are not kooky by any means. They dress in business casual mostly, evincing no untoward whooping or mania or anger. Gauging audience reaction to certain statements from the podium, I'd say the majority of them are serious Christians. They are serious people in general: rebels without cool, with no sense of humor or irony, armed merely with the conviction that they are right.

Their devotion to their beliefs is certainly religious. Indeed, tax litigation consultant Daniel Pilla, author of The IRS Problem Solver, says they're "like programmed cult members--you can't reason with them." More charitably, the tax honesty people are staunch exemplars of America's glorious Protestant heritage.

This observation is not merely a pun on their status as "tax protesters." Their attitude toward the Constitution and the statutes and legal decisions regarding the income tax are uniquely Protestant, relying on a layman's ability--indeed, obligation--to read and study and parse the original documents himself, to come to his own personal relationship with the law and the cases, and to prefer his understanding to that of the priesthood of lawyers, judges, and accountants.

"Case law"--the kind that proves that you can and will be arrested or fined for not filing or paying income tax means nothing to them; they like to rely strictly on the statutes as written, or on Supreme Court cases and straight constitutional interpretation. Irwin Schiff, the godfather of the movement, is insistent that you shouldn't just take his word for anything: You should check the statutes. He is, he declares, the biggest reseller of the published version of the U.S. tax code. He sells specially tabbed copies leading you straight to the pages in the multithousand-page behemoth you must see to understand his own interpretations.