The sovereign citizen movement is a loose grouping of American litigants, commentators, and financial scheme promoters. Self-described sovereign citizens take the position that they are answerable only to common law and are not subject to any statutes or proceedings at the federal, state or municipal levels, or that they do not recognize U.S. currency and that they are "free of any legal constraints". They especially reject most forms of taxation as illegitimate. Participants in the movement argue this concept in opposition to "federal citizens" who, they say, have unknowingly forfeited their rights by accepting some aspect of federal law.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies "sovereign citizens" among domestic terror threats as anti-government extremists. In 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) estimated that approximately 100,000 Americans were "hard-core sovereign believers" with another 200,000 "just starting out by testing sovereign techniques for resisting everything from speeding tickets to drug charges."
Read more about Sovereign Citizen Movement: Theories, History, Legal Status of Theories, Incidents, Public Image
Famous quotes containing the words sovereign, citizen and/or movement:
“Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“Women who assume authority are unnatural. Unnatural women are lesbians. Therefore all the leaders of the women’s movement were presumed to be lesbians.”
—Jane O’Reilly, U.S. feminist and humorist. The Girl I Left Behind, ch. 8 (1980)