No, Congress cannot ‘amend’ a law that repeals a law with the same repealed law. They must introduce a new law.
If Congress introduces a new bill that seeks to reestablish the Income Tax , then in order to have both the Income Tax and the FairTax, they would have to amend the FairTax to delete the Sunset provision AND they would have to stop the progress of the Amendment to Repeal the 16th Amendment. That’s a high bar.
In such as case it would be obvious what Congress is trying to do and there would be no votes for it.
Your perspective is that Congress can do whatever they want whenever they want. If that we’re the case there would be Comprehensive Immigration Reform with massive amnesty today.
Where Congress can sneak around nearly unimpeded is in passing ‘technical’ amendments and revisions to the Internal Revenue Code because in most cases they give generic innocuous authorizations to bureacrat regulators to write regulations as they will, and they pass these innocuous amendments in the dead of night when no one is looking.
But they can’t sneak in something as important as reintroducing the Income Tax.
“No, Congress cannot ‘amend’ a law that repeals a law with the same repealed law. They must introduce a new law.”
Sure they can, that is how Hairy Reed passed owebamacare.
He stripped every word of an unrelated funding bill congress had passed, replaced it with owebamacare wording, and passed that in the Senate with 50+1.
Look it up.