****Article V of the U.S. Constitution specifies the ratification process, and requires 3/4 of the States to ratify any amendment proposed by Congress. There were 48 States in the American Union in 1913, meaning that affirmative action of 36 states was required for ratification. In February, 1913, Secretary of State Philander Knox issued a proclamation claiming that 38 states had ratified the amendment.
In 1984, William J. Benson began a research project, never before performed, to investigate the process of ratification of the 16th Amendment. After traveling to the capitols of the New England states, and reviewing the journals of the state legislative bodies, he saw that many states had not ratified the Amendment. Continuing his research at the National Archives in Washington, DC, Bill Benson discovered his Golden Key. This damning piece of evidence is a 16 page memorandum from the Solicitor of the Department of State, whose duty is the provision of legal opinions for the use of the Secretary of State. In this memorandum sent to the Secretary of State, the Solicitor of the Department of State lists the many errors he found in the ratification process!
The 4 states listed below are among the 38 states that Philander Knox claimed ratification from.
* The Kentucky Senate voted upon the resolution, but rejected it by a vote of 9 in favor and 22 opposed.
* The Oklahoma Senate amended the language of the 16th Amendment to have a precisely opposite meaning.
* The California legislative assembly never recorded any vote upon any proposal to adopt the amendment proposed by Congress.
* The State of Minnesota sent nothing to the Secretary of State in Washington.
When his year long project was finished at the end of 1984, Bill had visited every state capitol and knew that not a single state had actually and legally ratified the proposal to amend the Constitution. 33 states engaged in the unauthorized activity of amending the language of the amendment proposed by congress, a power the states do not possess. Since 36 states were needed for ratification, the failure of 13 to ratify would be fatal to the amendment, and this occurs within the major (first three) defects tabulated in Defects in Ratification of the 16th Amendment. Even if we were to ignore defects of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, we would still have only 2 states which successfully ratified. ****
http://www.thelawthatneverwas.com/new/home.asp
Bill Benson
Our 100Q Woopoo chips commemorate famous tax scam artists. One of the most famous is William J. Benson, co-author of the infamous "The Law that Never Was" which claims that the 16th Amendment was never ratified by the states. Benson was indicted for tax evasion in 1980 and 1981 and a jury convicted him on all counts. Benson appealed his conviction on a variety of grounds, and won a reversal by the Seventh Circuit on a technicality. On retrial, a new jury also convicted him. Oh, well.
Idiots who have attempted Benson's defense in court have batted .000 and had the same results as Benson himself -- convictions for tax evasion. In the first of these cases, United States v. Thomas the Seventh Circuit held dispelled Benson's groundless assertion that the 16th Amendment was never ratified because some of the versions ratified had typos or insubstantial changes to the language of the amendment. The Seventh Circuit commented:
Benson and Beckman did not discover anything; they rediscovered something that Secretary Knox considered in 1913. Thirty-eight states ratified the sixteenth amendment, and thirty-seven sent formal instruments of ratification to the Secretary of State. (Minnesota notified the Secretary orally, and additional states ratified later; we consider only those Secretary Knox considered.) Only four instruments repeat the language of the sixteenth amendment exactly as Congress approved it. The others contain errors of diction, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The text Congress transmitted to the states was: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." Many of the instruments neglected to capitalize "States," and some capitalized other words instead. The instrument from Illinois had "remuneration" in place of "enumeration"; the instrument from Missouri substituted "levy" for "lay"; the instrument from Washington had "income" not "incomes"; others made similar blunders.
Thomas insists that because the states did not approve exactly the same test, the amendment did not go into effect. Secretary Knox considered this argument. The Solicitor of the Department of State drew up a list of the errors in the instruments and--taking into account both the triviality of the deviations and the treatment of earlier amendments that had experienced more substantial problems--advised the Secretary that he was authorized to declare the amendment adopted. The Secretary did so.
Although Thomas urges us to take the view of several state courts that only agreement on the literal text may make a legal document effective, the Supreme Court follows the "enrolled bill rule." If a legislative document is authenticated in regular form by the appropriate officials, the court treats that document as properly adopted. Field v. Clark, 143 U.S. 649, 36 L. Ed. 294, 12 S. Ct. 495 (1892). The principle is equally applicable to constitutional amendments. See Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, 66 L. Ed. 505, 42 S. Ct. 217 (1922), which treats as conclusive the declaration of the Secretary of State that the nineteenth amendment had been adopted. In United States v. Foster, 789 F.2d. 457 (7th Cir. 1986), slip op. 10-12 & n.6, we relied on Leser, as well as the inconsequential nature of the objections in the face of the 73-year acceptance of the effectiveness of the sixteenth amendment, to reject a claim similar to Thomas's. See also Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 83 L. Ed. 1385, 59 S. Ct. 972 (1939) (questions about ratification of amendments may be nonjusticiable). Secretary Knox declared that enough states had ratified the sixteenth amendment. The Secretary's decision is not transparently defective. We need not decide when, if ever, such a decision may be reviewed in order to know that Secretary Knox's decision is now beyond review.
Not impressed with Benson's research, Thomas was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to prison for 8 years and a fine of $30,000. Everybody thought that this statement by the Seventh Circuit which thoroughly de-bunked Benson's bogus arguments had put the matter to bed, and indeed after Thomas' conviction, even most tax protestors looked askance at his research and mostly avoided using it as a defense.
Nonethess, like a bad social disease, Benson and his theories have returned in recent years and been used in tax scams run by some of the worst tax scam artists, such as Global Prosperity. http://www.quatloos.com/groups/gpg.htm.
Bill Benson's "findings" have also been thoroughly de-bunked by a variety of researchers, including this extensive work: http://www.quatloos.com/bill_benson_debunked.htm
Blah blah blah. Since no Governor has repudiated the ratification nor has Congress nor the President nor ANY judge anywhere, that noise is just the sound of anopther pot cracking.