Well, then Neal Boortz misled me. He has been emphatic that the repeal of the 16th Amendment comes first, as a guarantee that the FAIR Tax would not be added on top of the current income tax.
BTW: Amendments don’t always take so long to pass. The ERA took literally forever because people didn’t want it. The repeal of the 18th amendment passed lickety-split.
I don’t ever recall Boortz saying that, and I have been in the NRST/FairTax “lobby” since 1991.