The IRS Is a Harassment Mechanism Of the United States Government

This article is an opinion piece from Bill Lockwood. Catch American Liberty with Bill Lockwood weekly at 11 a.m. Saturdays on NewsTalk 1290.

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As of January 10, the newly-elected Republican-led House of Representatives has slated to “abolish the Internal Revenue Service” and replace the existing tax-system with a consumption tax. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the Freedom Caucus that he would bring this measure to a vote.

According to the Washington Examiner, this bill “has a zero chance of becoming law during this Congress” but “envisions simplifying the tax code by scrapping the income tax, payroll tax, corporate taxes, gift taxes, and the death tax altogether and replacing them with a nationwide consumption tax on goods and services.”

Not only so, but “the IRS as an entity would also be killed by the legislation.”

The IRS And Income Tax

The income tax, first initiated by Abraham Lincoln as a measure to help pay for the Civil War, created a Commissioner of Internal Revenue which levied a three percent tax on incomes between $600 and $10,000 and a five percent tax on incomes of more than $10,000. This immediately set the course of the nation in direct opposition to the Constitution.

Our Founders had rejected any type of tax on income, for many clear and cogent reasons. One was the fact that the principle behind a “graduated” income tax is that the more you earn the larger percentage of tax you must pay, which is in essence discriminatory in nature. They therefore crafted Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution to say that “[A]ll duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

Further, Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, which came 80 years later, promised “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens. A graduated income tax violates this equal protection of rights and renders the income of those making more money less sacred and less protected than that of lower income earners.

The Founders even warned specifically about a graduated income tax as creating “factions” in the country — rich versus poor. As James Madison put it, “the spirit of party and faction” would prevail if Congress would tax one group of citizens more than another. This is exactly where we are today.

Breaking Down the Fourth Amendment

The income tax, enforced by the Treasury’s Department arm, the IRS, also violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. That provision guaranteed the right of the people to be protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Fourth Amendment protections were completely trashed by the Sixteenth Amendment. As T. Coleman Andrews, Commissioner of the IRS in the 1950’s stated:

Congress [in implementing the Sixteenth Amendment] went beyond merely enacting an income tax law and repealed Article IV of the Bill of Rights, by empowering the tax collector to do the very things from which that Article says we were to be secure. It opened up our homes our papers and our effect to the prying eyes of government agents and set the stage for searches of our books and vault and for inquiries into our private affairs whenever the ax men might decide, even though there might not e any justification beyond mere cynical suspicion.

On the House of Representatives floor in February 19, 1979, Congressman George Hansen of Idaho, a member of the House Banking and the Domestic Monetary committees, laid it out clearly.

The IRS long ago seems to have lost its sense of mission as a tax-collection agency and with all the grace of the hobnailed gestapo has embarked on a course of implementing and enforcing social reform with the view that Americans are basically dishonest, uncharitable, bigoted, criminal-minded and even violent to deal with.

 

…the Taxpayer is forced to produce the necessary substantiation. In addition, the Taxpayer is committed to spend time and money defending his position.

As further documented in his 1984 book, "To Harass Our People: The IRS and Government Abuse of Power," Hansen reveals in his expose that the IRS can invade the privacy of a citizen without a court process of any kind; can seize property without a court order; can force a citizen to try his case in a special court governed by the IRS; can legally, without court order, subject citizens to electronic surveillance; in short — make us all tax slaves.

All these heavy-handed measures are still not enough for the Democrats. They currently wish to hire 87,000 more IRS agents, apparently armed, to enforce even more stringent unconstitutional tax codes. And even though it looks as if the abolishment of the IRS will be blocked by Democrats, it is past time to rid ourselves of that agency — in spite of efforts to save it.