Fourteenth Amendment
Some tax protesters argue that all Americans are citizens of individual states as opposed to citizens of the United States, and that the United States therefore has no power to tax citizens or impose other federal laws outside of Washington D.C. and other federal enclaves The first sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment states:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.Notably, some tax protesters contend that the Fourteenth Amendment itself was never properly ratified, under the theory that the governments of southern states that supported the post-Civil War amendments were not representative of the people.
Courts have uniformly held that this argument that the Fourteenth Amendment divested state citizens of U.S. citizenship is plainly incorrect. In Kantor v. Wellesley Galleries, Ltd., the court explained that "hile the Fourteenth Amendment does not create a national citizenship, it has the effect of making that citizenship 'paramount and dominant' instead of 'derivative and dependent' upon state citizenship". See also United States v. Ward,Fox v. Commissioner, and United States v. Baker.
Read more about this topic: Tax Protester Constitutional Arguments
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