Chapter 1:
The Brushaber Decision
Historically,
defensive federal officials have argued that the 16th Amendment is
constitutional because the Supreme Court of the United States has said so. In the year 1916, the high court issued a pivotal
decision which is identified in the case law as Brushaber v. Union Pacific
Railroad Company, 240 U.S. 1. It is
important to realize that the evidence impugning the ratification of the 16th
Amendment was not published until the year 1985. This evidence was simply not available to plaintiff Frank R.
Brushaber when he filed his first complaint on March 13, 1914, in the District
Court of the United States ("DCUS") for the Southern District of New
York. His complaint challenged the
constitutionality of the income tax statute which Congress had passed
immediately after the 16th Amendment was declared ratified. Specifically, he challenged the
constitutionality of the income tax as it applied to a corporation of which he
was a shareholder, i.e., the Union
Pacific Railroad Company. His challenge
went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he lost.
Ever since
then, attorneys, judges and other officials of the federal government have been
quick to cite the Brushaber case, and others which followed, as
undeniable proof that the 16th Amendment is constitutional. With its constitutionality seemingly settled
by the Brushaber ruling, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue Donald
C. Alexander felt free, almost 60 years later, to cite the 16th Amendment as the constitutional authority for the
government to tax the income of individuals and corporations. Consider the following statement of his
which was published in the official Federal Register of March 29, 1974,
in the section entitled "Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue
Service, Organization and Functions".
His statement reads in part:
(2)
Since 1862, the Internal Revenue Service has undergone a period of
steady growth as the means for financing Government operations shifted from the
levying of import duties to internal taxation.
Its expansion received
considerable impetus in 1913 with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment
to the Constitution under which Congress received constitutional authority to
levy taxes on the income of individuals and corporations.
[Vol. 39, No. 62, page 11572]
[emphasis added]
What is not
widely known about the Brushaber decision is the essence of the
ruling. Contrary to widespread legal
opinion which has persisted even until now, the Supreme Court ruled that
taxation on income is an indirect
tax, not a direct tax. The Supreme
Court also ruled that the 16th Amendment did not change or repeal any part of the Constitution, nor did it
authorize any direct tax without
apportionment. To illustrate the
persistence of wrong opinions, on a recent vacation to Montana, I had occasion
to visit the federal building in the city of Missoula. On the wall outside the Federal District
Court, Room 263, a printed copy of the U.S. Constitution is displayed in text
which annotates the 16th Amendment with the following statement:
This amendment modifies Paragraph 3,
Section 2, of Article I and Paragraph 4, Section 9, of Article I.
In light of
the Brushaber decision, this statement is plainly wrong and totally
misleading. The text of the 16th
Amendment contains absolutely no references to other sections of the U.S.
Constitution (unlike the repeal of Prohibition). In his excellent book entitled The Best Kept Secret,
author Otto Skinner reviews a number of common misunderstandings like this
about the 16th Amendment, and provides ample support in subsequent case law for
the clarifications he provides.
Interested readers are encouraged to order Otto Skinner's work by
referring to the Bibliography (Appendix N).
The U.S.
Constitution still requires that federal direct taxes must be apportioned among
the 50 States of the Union. Thus, if
California has 10 percent of the nation's population, then California's
"portion" would be 10 percent of any direct federal tax. In the Brushaber decision, the
Supreme Court concluded that income
taxes are excises which fall into the category of indirect taxes, not direct
taxes. From the beginning, the U.S.
Constitution has made an explicit distinction between the two types of taxation
authorized to the Congress, with separate limitations for each type: indirect
taxes must be uniform across the States;
direct taxes must be apportioned.
Writing for the majority in one of his clearer passages, Chief Justice
Edward Douglass White explained it this way:
[T]he conclusion reached in the Pollock
Case did not in any degree involve holding that income taxes generically and
necessarily came within the class of direct taxes on property, but on the
contrary recognized the fact that taxation
on income was in its nature an excise entitled to be enforced as such
....
[Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co.]
[240 U.S. 1 (1916), emphasis added]
Unfortunately
for Justice White, most of the language he chose to write the majority's opinion,
and the resulting logic contained therein, are tortuously convoluted and almost
totally unintelligible, even to college-educated English majors. In his wonderful tour de force entitled Tax Scam, author Alan Stang quips
that Justice White:
... turned himself into a pretzel trying
to justify the new tax without totally junking the Constitution.
[page 45]
Stang's book
is a must, if only because his extraordinary wit is totally rare among the tax
books listed in the Bibliography (Appendix N). Other legal scholars and experienced
constitutional lawyers have published books which take serious aim at one or more elements of White's ruling. Jeffrey Dickstein's Judicial Tyranny and
Your Income Tax and Vern Holland's The Law That Always Was are two
excellent works of this kind. Both
authors focus on the constitutional distinctions between direct and indirect
taxes, and between the apportionment and uniformity rules, respectively.
Dickstein
does a masterful job of tracing a century of federal court decisions, with an
emphasis on the bias and conflict among federal court definitions of the key
word "income". He exercises
rigorous logic to demonstrate how the Brushaber ruling stands in stark
contrast to the important Supreme Court precedents that came before and after it in time. For example, after a meticulous comparison
of Pollock with Brushaber, Dickstein is forced to conclude that:
Justice White's indirect attempt to
overturn Pollock is wholly
unpersuasive; he clearly failed to
state a historical, factual or legal basis for his conclusion that a tax on
income is an indirect, excise tax. It
is clear that Mr. Brushaber and his attorneys correctly stated the proposition
to the Supreme Court that the Sixteenth
Amendment relieved the income tax, which was a direct tax, from the requirement
of apportionment, and that the Brushaber
Court failed miserably in attempting to refute Mr. Brushaber's legal position.
[Judicial Tyranny and Your Income Tax, page 60]
[emphasis added]
Dickstein also proves that an irreconcilable conflict
exists between the Brushaber decision and a subsequent key decision of
the Supreme Court, Eisner v. Macomber, 252 U.S. 189:
There is an irreconcilable conflict
between the Brushaber case, which holds the income tax is an indirect
tax not requiring apportionment, and the Eisner case, which holds the
income tax is a direct tax relieved from apportionment.
[Judicial Tyranny and Your Income Tax]
[footnote on page 141]
Going back even further in American history, Holland argues
persuasively that "income" taxes have always been direct taxes which must be apportioned even today, Brushaber
notwithstanding:
It results,
therefore: ...
4. That the Sixteenth Amendment did not amend
the Constitution. The United States
Supreme Court by unanimous decisions determined that the amendment did not
grant any new powers of taxation; that
a direct tax cannot be relieved from the constitutional mandate of
apportionment; and the only effect of
the amendment was to overturn the theory advanced in the Pollock case
which held that a tax on income, was in legal effect, a tax on the sources of
the income. ...
6. [T]hat a General Tax on Income levied upon one of the Citizens of the several States, has always been a direct tax and must be apportioned.
[The Law That Always Was, page 220]
[emphasis in original]
There are, however, two additional
lessons from the Brushaber decision which have been entirely lost on
most, if not all of the authors who have published any analysis of this
important ruling. These are the dual
issues of status and jurisdiction, issues which it is my
intention to elevate to the level of importance which they have always
deserved. An understanding of status
and jurisdiction places the Brushaber ruling in a new and different
light, and solves a number of persistent mysteries and misunderstandings which
have grown up around an income tax law which now includes some 2,000 pages of
statutes and 10,000 pages of regulations.
More precisely, the published rules of statutory construction require us
to say that the income tax law now includes only
2,000 pages of statutes and 10,000 pages of regulations.
Obviously,
without a comprehensive paradigm with which to navigate such a vast quantity of
legalese, particularly when this legalese is only slightly more intelligible
than White's verbal pretzels, it is easy to understand why professors, lawyers,
CPA's, judges, prosecutors, defendants and juries consistently fail to fathom
its meaning. In the Republic envisioned
by the Framers of the Constitution, a sophisticated paradigm should not be
necessary for the ordinary layman to understand any law. In and of itself,
the need for a sophisticated paradigm is a sufficient ground to nullify the law
for being vague and too difficult to understand in the first place. Nevertheless, the remainder of this book
will show that status and jurisdiction together provide a comprehensive
paradigm with sufficient explanatory power not only to solve the persistent
mysteries, but also to provide vast numbers of Americans with the tax relief
they so desperately need and deserve.
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Reader’s Notes: