16th amendment

The 16th amendment had been sent out in 1909 to the state governors for ratification by the state legislatures after having been passed by Congress. There were 48 states at that time, and three-fourths, or 36, of them were required to give their approval in order for it to be ratified. The process took almost the whole term of the Taft administration, from 1909 to 1913.

Knox had received responses from 42 states when he declared the 16th amendment ratified on February 25, 1913, just a few days before leaving office to make way for the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Knox acknowledged that four of those states (Utah, Conn, R.I. and N.H.) had rejected it, and he counted 38 states as having approved it. Soregarding the approval of the amendment in many of those states.

In Kentucky, the legislature acted on the amendment without even having received it from the governor (the governor of each state was to transmit the proposed amendment to the state legislature). The version of the amendment that the Kentucky legislature made up and acted upon omitted the words “on income” from the text, so they weren’t even voting on an income tax! When they straightened that out (with the help of the governor), the Kentucky senate rejected the amendment. Yet Philander Knox counted Kentucky as approving it!

In Oklahoma, the legislature changed the wording of the amendment so that its meaning was virtually the opposite of what was intended by Congress, and this was the version they sent back to Knox. Yet Knox counted Oklahoma as approving it, despite a memo from his chief legal counsel, Reuben Clark, that states were not allowed to change it in any way.

Attorneys who have studied the subject have agreed that Kentucky and Oklahoma should not have been counted as approvals by Philander Knox, and, moreover, if any state could be shown to have violated its own state constitution or laws in its approval process, then that state’s approval would have to be thrown out. That gets us past the “presumptive conclusion” argument, which says that the actions of an executive official cannot be judged by a court, and admits that Knox could be wrong.

If we subtract Kentucky and Oklahoma from the 38 approvals above, the count of valid approvals falls to 36, the exact number needed for ratification. If any more states can be shown to have had invalid approvals, the 16th amendment must be regarded as null and void.

The state constitution of Tennessee prohibited the state legislature from acting on any proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution sent by Congress until after the next election of state legislators. The intent, of course, is to give the proposed amendment a chance to become an issue in the state legislative elections so that the people can have a voice in determining the outcome. It also provides a cooling off period to reduce the tendency to approve an idea just because it happens to be the moment’s trend. You’ve probably already guessed that the Tennessee legislature did not hold off on voting for the amendment until after the next election, and you’d be right - they didn’t; hence, they acted upon it illegally before they were authorized to do so. They also violated their own state constitution by failing to read the resolution on three different days as prescribed by Article II, Section 18. These state constitutional violations make their approval of the amendment null and void. Their approval is and was invalid, and it brings the number of approving states down to 35, one less than required for ratification.

Texas and Louisiana violated provisions in their state constitutions prohibiting the legislatures from empowering the federal government with any additional taxing authority. Now the number is down to 33.

Twelve other states, besides Tennessee, violated provisions in their constitutions requiring that a bill be read on three different days before voting on it. This is not a trivial requirement. It allows for a cooling off period; it enables members who may be absent one day to be present on another; it allows for a better familiarity with, and understanding of, the measure under consideration, since some members may not always read a bill or resolution before voting on it (believe it or not!). States violating this procedure were: Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, West Virginia, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Colorado, and Illinois. Now the number is reduced to 21 states legally ratifying the amendment.

When Secretary Knox transmitted the proposed amendment to the states, official certified and sealed copies were sent. Likewise, when state results were returned to Knox, it was required that the documents, including the resolution that was actually approved, be properly certified, signed, and sealed by the appropriate official(s). This is no more than any ordinary citizen has to do in filing any legal document, so that it’s authenticity is assured; otherwise it is not acceptable and is meaningless. How much more important it is to authenticate a constitutional amendment! Yet a number of states did not do this, returning uncertified, unsigned, and/or unsealed copies, and did not rectify their negligence even after being reminded and warned by Knox. The most egregious offenders were Ohio, California, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Minnesota - which did not send any copy at all, so Knox could not have known what they even voted on! Since four of these states were already disqualified above, California is now subtracted from the list of valid approvals, reducing it to 20.

These last five states, along with Kentucky and Oklahoma, have particularly strong implications with regard to the fraud charge against Knox, in that he cannot be excused for not knowing they shouldn’t have been counted. Why was he in such a hurry? Why did he not demand that they send proper documentation? They never did.

Further review would make the list dwindle down much more, but with the number down to 20, sixteen fewer than required, this is a suitable place to rest, without getting into the matter of several states whose constitutions limited the taxing authority of their legislatures, which could not give to the federal govern authority they did not have.

The results from the six states Knox had not heard from at the time he made his proclamation do not affect the conclusion that the amendment was not legally ratified. Of those six: two (Virginia and Pennsylvania) he never did hear from, because they ignored the proposed amendment; Florida rejected it; two others (Vermont and Massachusetts) had rejected it much earlier by recorded votes, but, strangely, submitted to the Secretary within a few days of his ratification proclamation that they had passed it (without recorded votes); West Virginia had purportedly approved it at the end of January 1913, but its notification had not yet been received (remember that West Virginia had violated its own constitution, as noted above).
So isn’t the 16th amendment nothing more than a fraud? Also didn’t the supreme court rule, which it does on matters of the constitution that the 16th amendment did not give the government any new powers of taxation?
So what do you think about this?

Thoroughly debunked (with citations to controlling law) here. Scroll down to Section D, Contention 5.

Good point. The income tax is tax is illegal and you will be able to argue yourself out a long jail sentence. Further, you are so clever you will be the first one to do so. Others will follow, then government will fall!

You are Sparticus!

The point being…the amendment was not lawful from the start stating the facts that so many states did not follow their constitution thus making amendment invalid. So we just let the federal reserve railroad this country because they greased a few palms and take our money. It goes to the government to pay our debt that we can never repay. They get the gold and we get a worthless piece of paper. Let see you try to produce a document in court and pass it off as a legal document without proper authentication and see how far you go with that. This was fraud from the begining no matter what laws or case’s there are. The law was broken and the constitution stepped on plain and simple. Why do you think our presidents of old were trying to do back then…Stop the banks from taking control of our country. All these cases and IRS codes are after the fact. The amendment wasn’t legal and was crammed down the throats of the american people.

Where are you going with this? Want to abolish income tax? Close the government down?

I read the contention about ohio, but i guess we ignore the other 17 states that did not follow their own constitutions along with ohio and not following proper procedures to ratify on matters of the constitution. Facts are facts. We were a free nation before we let crooked politicians like philander knox pull the biggest fraud in history on the american people. We have just accepted it. Thank you sir may i have another, thank you sir may i have another.

Mk vll…how did our government survive from 1776-1913? They did it without taxing a man’s labor…corporate tax’s are legal! your gas tax is legal among a hundred other tax’s, yet they collect almost 4 times more in income tax (your wages earned for exchange of your hard work) than they do coporate tax’s.

I’m guessing you’re a gold standard guy as well from the "they get the gold and we get a worthless piece of paper"comment above. May I ask if you have any learning in the field of economics at all?

The standard trope in all these fantasies is that the world is populated by The Evil Politicians (who are small in number, conceived of as rapacious, self-serving and utterly inimical to all things honest and pure) and The People (who are vast in number, innocent, naive, childlike, honest and put-upon). You do realise this is the plot driver of every Robin Hood fantasy since time immemorial? Does that not tell you might perhaps have a rather simplistic idea of the world and how it operates?

In between are the Cassandras (such as yourself) who believe themselves to see The Truth, and who believe their heroic self-appointed task to be to unmask The Evil Politicians and to add to the list of virtues of The People that of insight into their true position of victimhood.

It is of the essence of the Cassandra that he (believes he) can see the truth but is not himself believed. This is essential, because at some level the Cassandra relies on the status quo that he realises would be destroyed if his beliefs were actually taken seriously. You do understand that America would collapse economically if ever your ideas were taken seriously, don’t you? You do realise that everyone else knows this too, don’t you? The world pre1913 is vastly different from the world today.

The idea of a perfect golden past (“we were a free nation before we let crooked politicians”…etc) whose bright memory is soiled by a debased present is another comforting but silly part of the fantasy.

What is troubling is the smallness of the world you seem to inhabit. You seem to think it is possible for a small handful of politicians to shove an unwanted amendment down the throats of The People as though the world were the size of the small town in Its a Wonderful Life and one or two Henry Potters were able to rule like kings. Ain’t like that.

To believe that crooked politicians could pull a huge fraud on the American people and no-one noticed (except, of course, the remarkably perspicacious Cassandra and his tiny number of fellow travellers, who congratulate themselves on their genius) is silly. Courts have regularly ruled against the nonsense you advance every single time it has been advanced. Are you seriously suggesting that every single court is in on this giant fraud? If it were possible to engineer this, why bother with government at all? Whoever can do that is powerful beyond the need to hide behind a facade of democracy.

If “facts are facts”, how do you know them to be so? Because you read them in some book by some nutjob like Benson or Schulz?

If the Internal Revenue Act was flawed, don’t you think it would have been fixed by now? All of Them would want to fix it. As you pointed out Them are all-powerful.

Typical tax-evader fantasy drivel. I really wish the lot of you would find some empty acres somewhere in the Rockies or something and really go live your self-sufficiency dreams. We’ll come over in the spring and clean up the bones.

That people still expound this drivel is proof that our educational system has failed.

These arguments give conservatives a bad name! :FACEPALM:

See also Cecil’s column on Ohio and the 16th Amendment.

Since I’m not seeing an actual factual question in the OP, I’m going to move this to GD.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

I got no answers…as usual. Nobody address the question…I live in a fairy tale or i am a tax evader but no answers…most sound like IRS agents defending the code…Then dispute what i had posted about the states involved who did not lawfully ratify the amendment! Of course we would expect the government to fix the flawed amendment by now …I mean all that what i posted is dribble and i am sure some you could show me that by researching it yourself and proving me wrong. We have this illusion that paying your income tax is soooo AMERICAN! It was these same bankers who had been trying for years to slip in the back door to control our money suppy…They first succeded in 1791 calling themselves the 1st bank of america and recevied a 20 year charter until 1811 when congress voted not to re-new their charter. Thats why Nathan Mayer Rothschild was not amused and he states,

“Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war.”
However the United States stands firm and the Charter is not renewed, which causes Nathan Mayer Rothschild to issue another threat,
“Teach those impudent Americans a lesson. Bring them back to colonial status.”
Then in 1816 congress passes another bill permitting them to come back and they name themselves the 2nd bank of the united states after thousands of british and american soldiers had to die. After their 20 year charter was up president jackson threw them back out and did not renew their charter. Another bill was proposed and president tyler veoted another request for a charter after numerous death threats. In 1845 before president jackson died he is asked what he regarded his as greatest achievement. He replies without hesitation,

“I Killed The Bank,”
This is in reference to the fact he banished the Rothschilds Second Bank of the United States in 1836. By April 1862 $449,338,902 worth of Lincoln’s debt free money has been printed and distributed. He states of this,

“We gave the people of this republic the greatest blessing they ever had, their own paper money to pay their own debts.”
That same year The Times of London publishes a story containing the following statement,
“If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without a debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce.
It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
What a novel idea for some of you PRO FEDERAL RESERVIST!
So it brings us to 1913 On March 4, Woodrow Wilson is elected the 28th President of the United States. Shortly after he is inaugurated, he is visited in the White House by Samuel Untermyer, of law firm, Guggenheim, Untermyer, and Marshall, who tries to blackmail him for the sum of $40,000 in relation to an affair Wilson had whilst he was a professor at Princeton University, with a fellow professor’s wife.
President Wilson does not have the money, so Untermyer volunteers to pay the $40,000 out of his own pocket to the woman Wilson had had the affair with, on the condition that Wilson promise to appoint to the first vacancy on the United States Supreme Court a nominee to be recommended to President Wilson by Untermyer. Wilson agrees to this.

Jacob Schiff sets up the Anti Defamation League (ADL) in the United States. This organisation is formed to slander anyone who questions or challenges these banking elities as, “anti-semitic.”

Strangely enough, the same year that they do this they also set up their last and current central bank in America, the Federal Reserve. Congressman Charles Lindbergh stated following the passing of the Federal Reserve Act on December 23,

“The Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this Bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized…The greatest crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill.”
It is important to note that the Federal Reserve is a private company, it is neither Federal nor does it have any Reserve. It is conservatively estimated that profits exceed $150 billion per year and the Federal Reserve has never once in its history published accounts. They will throw you in jail if you are not transparent about your income, how your EARNED it and what you did with it but yet to this day they have not done the same…But as good american’s we shouldn’t worry about that, just shut as do as they say not as they do…So all i get instead of evidence that my origanal post is not historically correct…I receive answers like go live in the rockies and live out my fantasies or i must be some gold standard guy. The dribble im hearing are from some of you in which not one addressed the validity in my original post. “The provisions of the Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged…” S. Pacific v. Lowe, 238 F. 847 (US Dist. Ct. S.D., N.Y., 1917); U.S. 330 (1918)
The legislative history merely shows that the words ‘from whatever source derived’ of the Sixteenth Amendment were not affirmatively intended to authorize Congress to tax state bond interest or to have any other effect on which incomes were subject to the federal taxation, and that the sole purpose of the Sixteenth Amendment was to remove the apportionment requirement for whichever incomes were otherwise taxable." [South Carolina v. Baker, 485 U.S. 505 (1988)
“The Sixteenth Amendment, although referred to in argument, has no real bearing and may be put out of view. As pointed out in recent decisions, (Brushaber), it does not extend the taxing power to new or excepted subjects, but merely removes all occasion, which otherwise might exist, for an apportionment among the states of taxes laid on income, whether it be derived from one source or another.” Peck v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165 (1918.
I have always paid my tax’s so being called a tax evader is not accurate. Instead of calling me childish names and making up fairy tales, although i did think the robin hook and cassandra’s piece was quite entertaing. Silly me thinking that the government could pull off such dirty tricks is beyond comprehension. Ater all they only have your best intrest at heart. I just like to toss around these crazy ideas that i get from historical accounts just to piss some of you off. It makes for good conversation, atleast for some.

A useful quotation for considering arguments such as that made by the OP: “Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.” Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir. 1986), 791 F.2d 68, 69.

The entire OP appears to have been cribbed from a page belonging to the “We The People Foundation”, an organization that counts “demanding a birth certificate from Barack Obama” among its various projects. The article has appeared elsewhere as well, dating back at least to 2005.

First, the SDMB frowns upon reprinting entire articles without retribution. It is at best fraudulent and at worst unlawful to repost an entire article stolen from somewhere else as your own work. Unless, I suppose, you object to the law of copyright, as well; I look forward to your next stolen article on the subject.

Second, if you don’t want to be taken as a nut, don’t associate yourself with nuts.

Taxes. The plural of “tax” is “taxes”.

Nonsense. You got a pretty good answer in the very first response. You happen to not like the answer, but an answer was, in fact, provided.

Okay…the question is giving the facts ON RECORD that you will never hear anyone talk about is that the ratification process was not valid in many states making the 16th amendment not valid…Etiher the states (in question) lawfully ratified the amendment or not??? I can pick up books and read historical data and biographies on our leaders of the past. Here’s a quote:Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth. Somehow we have lost the american spirit to question authority, instead it has been replaced by complacency. If our forefathers thought like (some) of you, we wouldnt be talking about this right now.

Courts have expressly ruled that in approving constitutional amendments, states are performing a federal function, and that burdens imposed on that process by state constitutions are therefore ineffective. Courts have also ruled that errors in typography and transmission are irrelevant to the validity of an amendment. Defeating the substantive will of the people based on technicalities is anti-democratic.