Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election not only failed, but were also based partly on a misinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution. as our recent evaluation arguesThe corresponding constitutional provision dates from the period immediately after the Civil War and was recognized by contemporaries as a central protective mechanism of American democracy.

In November 2020, when it became clear that Trump had lost the favored vote and would lose the Electoral College, Trump and his supporters organized a Print campaign to steer the legislatures of several states whose residents voted for Joe Biden to appoint electors who would support Trump's re-election within the Electoral College vote.

Trump and his allies contacted Republican lawmakers in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania to State parliaments to overturn the end result of the favored vote. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, via email to GOP lawmakers in Arizonaand called on them to “ensure that a clean slate of electors is elected.”

These efforts were based on a provision of the Constitution in Article II, Section 1, which states: “Each State shall appoint in the manner prescribed by the legislatora number of electors.” Trump and his supporters wanted state legislatures to discard their residents’ votes and easily appoint electors who would support Trump’s re-election campaign.

As a part of their efforts, Trump and his supporters claimed that the Constitution allows state legislatures to directly elect an inventory of electors and not using a referendum.

But they were improper. There was already a safeguard in place – and it still exists today – to forestall this approach from getting used to undermine the 2024 presidential election.

An try and protect the facility of the voters

In just about all states Candidate who receives probably the most votes For the presidency, the candidate receives all of the votes of the electors of the respective state. Nebraska and Maine have small exceptions – but under the laws of those states, nearly all of electoral votes still go to whoever receives nearly all of votes nationwide.

In the late 1860s, when the 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified, the identical was true – although the proper to vote limited to men until 1920and states often denied or restricted the proper to vote for some residents, particularly members of ethnic minorities. After the Civil War, Congress attempted to cut back barriers to voting for black men, particularly within the South.

When Congress debated the 14th Amendment in 1866, its drafters drafted Section 2 in a Efforts to force reluctant white Southerners to grant black men the proper to vote.

Section 2 of the 14th Amendment states: “if the right to vote in every election for choosing Electors for President and Vice President of the United States … is denied … or in any manner abridged …, the basis of representation” for that State within the United States House of Representatives “shall be reduced” in proportion to the quantity of the abridgement.

So if a state were to deprive one in all its residents of the proper to vote, it might immediately lose the identical percentage of seats within the House of Representatives as a percentage of people that were disenfranchised.

Just just a few weeks after ratification, this provision was questioned for the primary time.

The Republican-dominated Reconstruction Legislature of Florida decided to carry presidential elections without popular vote. The Democrats—then the party that supported black disenfranchisement—were furious. Many Southern newspaper journalists, still indignant concerning the ratification of the 14th Amendment, saw a chance to show the amendment against its Republican authors.

“The easy conclusion is that if in a state “If the choice of Presidential Electors is no longer left to the people, and placed in the hands of the Legislature, the whole citizenry of the State… will be excluded from it,” wrote the Charleston Daily News on August 10, 1868.

This was not a rare or local view: nine days later, the Anderson Intelligencer, a South Carolina newspaper, published a brief article attributed to the New York Herald that stated similarly:

“If all voters in a state are denied the proper to decide on presidential electorsthen the premise of representation on this state have to be reduced by the variety of all voters, that’s, there must not be any basis of representation in any respect.”

These opinion pieces don’t have any legal authority, but they reflect a standard – albeit controversial – Understanding the provisions of the 14th Amendment on the time of its passage. No one filed a lawsuit, so no court had the chance to comment. And the Republican-dominated Congress had no qualms about accepting electoral votes – even and not using a popular vote – for the Republican presidential candidate.

The right to have your vote counted

After the 2020 election, Congress took steps to make clear that electors have to be those who select presidential electors. A law passed in 2022 revised the federal law governing electoral college selection to require state legislatures to find out their state's method for choosing electors before Election Day and can not change it after the votes have been forged.

This clarification is consistent with, and even strengthens, the provisions of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment.

As our evaluation shows, a direct election of electors by a state legislature would disenfranchise all voters within the state. After all, the proper to vote is the proper to have one's vote counted, not the proper to have one's candidate win.

Thus, even when the legislature were to pick out a slate of electors that might have received significant support in the favored election, the legislature's decision would limit the rights of each voter within the state. Disenfranchisement is determined by whether the people or the legislature selects the electors, not on which electors are chosen.

If all voters in a state are disenfranchised, Section 2 requires that the The state’s representation within the House of Representatives will probably be immediately and mechanically reduced to zero. The Constitution elsewhere provides that the representation of every state within the Electoral College Total of the delegations of the House of Representatives and the Senate of the State.

If a state doesn’t have a representative within the House of Representatives, it might only have two electors, making its influence on the presidential election negligible and largely irrelevant.

A single exception

To date, it’s the only case, other than Florida in 1868, during which a state legislature has chosen its presidential electors and not using a popular vote. got here in 1876.

Electoral fraud, political violence and voter intimidation undermined the integrity of the 1876 presidential electionThe Constitution of Colorado, which was newly recognized as a state, provided that the legislature In 1876, elect the state's presidential electors and not using a popular voteOvershadowed by an exceptionally bitter election, the number of Colorado’s presidential electors by the legislature relatively little attention or debate.

Overall, one can conclude that Southern newspapers in 1868 read the text of Section 2 accurately. The authors could have been cynical opportunists looking for to defend an untenable racist hierarchy, but their interpretation of the text is cheap.

The meaning of Section 2 is obvious and provides for severe penalties if a state doesn’t allow its residents to vote for presidential electors. The 14th Amendment continues to guard American democracy greater than 150 years after its ratification.

Today is Sunday, August 18, the 231st day of the yr 2024. There are 135 days left within the yr.

Today in history:

On August 18, 1920, the nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing American women the fitting to vote. Tennessee was the thirty sixth state to approve it.

Also on this date:

In 1590, John White, governor of the Roanoke Island colony (in present-day North Carolina), returned to Roanoke after nearly three years abroad to search out the settlement deserted; the fate of the “lost colony” stays a mystery.

In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was published within the USA.

In 1963, James Meredith became the primary black student to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

In 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, ended after three nights with a performance by Jimi Hendrix within the morning.

In 1983, Hurricane Alicia hit the Texas coast, killing 21 people and causing over $1 billion in damage.

In 2004, Paul Hamm (hahm) won the Olympic gold medal within the gymnasts' all-around competition in Athens by the narrowest margin ever in that discipline. Controversy arose when it emerged that a scoring error cost South Korean Yang Tae-young the title.

In 2005, a judge in Wichita, Kansas, sentenced BTK serial killer Dennis Rader to 10 consecutive life sentences, the utmost sentence allowed by law.

In 2014, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon ordered the National Guard to Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis rocked by protests over the fatal shooting of 18-year-old black man Michael Brown.

Today's birthdays:

• Actor and director Robert Redford is 88.
• Actress Carole Bouquet is 67.
• Actor Denis Leary is 67.
• Actress Madeleine Stowe is 66.
• ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff is 63.
• Actor Edward Norton is 55.
• Actor Christian Slater is 55.
• Actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner is 54.
• Actress Kaitlin Olson is 49.
• Actor and comedian Andy Samberg is 46.
• Artist-model Frances Bean Cobain is 32.
• Actress and singer Maia Mitchell is 31.
• Actress Madelaine Petsch is 30.
• Olympic gold medalist in swimming, Summer McIntosh, is eighteen.

Originally published: August 18, 2024 at 01:00

The U.S. Supreme Court has sent back to the lower courts the choice on whether states can prevent social media firms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) from regulating and controlling what users can post on their platforms.

Laws in Florida And Texas attempted to impose restrictions on social media platforms' internal policies and algorithms that influence which posts are promoted and widely shared and that are made less visible and even removed.

In the Unanimous decisionissued on July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court remanded the 2 cases, Moody v. NetChoice And NetChoice v. Paxtonto the eleventh and fifth U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals. The court admonished the lower courts for failing to think about the complete scope of the law's application. It also admonished the lower courts to think about the Constitution's limits on government interference with private speech.

Different views on social media sites

In their arguments in court in February 2024, the 2 sides described competing visions of how social media matches into the customarily overwhelming flood of knowledge that defines modern digital society.

The states said the platforms were mere communication channels, or “Moderators of speeches”, just like traditional telephone firms, which were required to forward all calls and weren’t allowed to discriminate against users. The states declared that the platforms needed to forward all posts from users without discriminating against them based on their speech.

The states argued that the content moderation rules imposed by the social media firms weren’t examples of the platforms themselves speaking out — or selecting not to talk out. Rather, the states said, the principles influenced the platforms' behavior and led them to censor certain views by allowing them to dictate who could speak on what topics, which is just not protected by the First Amendment.

In contrast, the social media platforms represented by NetChoicea technology industry trade group, argued that platforms' policies about what is appropriate on their sites are protected by the First Amendment guarantee Freedom of speech without state interferenceThe firms say their platforms usually are not public forums which may be subject to government regulation, but private services that could make their very own editorial judgement about what appears and what doesn’t appear on their web sites.

They argued that their policies were facets of their very own free speech rights and that they ought to be allowed to develop and implement policies about what was acceptable speech on their platforms based on their very own First Amendment rights.

A reorientation by the Supreme Court

All litigants—NetChoice, Texas, and Florida—framed the difficulty across the laws' impact on the platforms' content moderation policies, specifically whether the platforms practiced protected speech. The U.S. eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's injunction against the Florida law, finding that the platforms' content moderation policies were speech and the law was unconstitutional.

The U.S. fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reached the alternative conclusion, finding that the platforms weren’t engaged in speech but that the platforms' algorithms controlled the platforms' conduct, which was not protected by the First Amendment. The fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the conduct was censorship and overturned a lower court injunction against the Texas law.

However, the Supreme Court reframed the inquiry. The court found that the lower courts had not considered the complete range of activities covered by the laws. So while a First Amendment inquiry was appropriate, the lower courts' decisions and the parties' arguments were incomplete. The court added that neither the parties nor the lower courts had conducted a radical evaluation of whether and the way the state laws affected other elements of the platforms' products, similar to Facebook's direct messaging applications, or whether the laws had any impact in any respect on email providers or online marketplaces.

The Supreme Court asked the lower courts to research the laws and their effects rather more fastidiously and provided some guidelines.

Principles of the First Amendment

The court ruled that the content moderation policies reflect the platforms' constitutionally protected editorial decisions, no less than with regard to what the court describes as “core applications” of the laws – similar to Facebook's news feed and YouTube's homepage.

The Supreme Court asked lower courts to think about two core constitutional principles of the First Amendment. First, the Amendment protects speakers from being coerced into communicating messages they might somewhat keep quiet. The editorial discretion of firms, including social media firms, that compile and curate the speech of others is an activity protected by the First Amendment.

The other principle is that the amendment prevents the federal government from controlling private speech, even when it does so for the aim of balancing the marketplace of ideas. Neither the state nor the federal government may manipulate that marketplace to present a more balanced range of viewpoints.

The Court also confirmed that these principles apply to digital media in the identical way as they apply to traditional or conventional media.

In her 96-page opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution … remains valid when it comes to social media.” For now, it looks like social media platforms will proceed to regulate their content.

At the recent annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, quite a few motions were made as regards to women. The Conversation asked Susan Shawa gender and sexuality scholar who studies Southern Baptist women to elucidate the election and other developments within the country's largest Protestant denomination.

The Southern Baptist Convention has rejected a proposal that explicitly stated that only men might be pastors. Does this mean that the SBC is changing and becoming more accepting of ladies in leadership positions?

Absolutely not. The day before the vote on the proposed constitutional amendment of the denomination to exclude churches with women in pastoral roles, the Convention expelled the First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, for its position that girls can function pastors. The vote was not even close, 6,759 to 563.

How many female pastors are there currently within the SBC? Could you furthermore mght share a bit concerning the history of resistance to women in leadership positions?

There is somewhere between 1,000 To 1,800 Women who function pastors in Southern Baptist churches. Few, if any, of those women are senior pastors. Instead, they’re assistant pastors, youth or children's pastors, women's pastors, or other varieties of pastors, all of whom work under the supervision of a male senior pastor.

The SBC adopted a Resolution of 1984 Rejection of ladies as leading pastors.

While resolutions are usually not binding on local churches, the proposed constitutional amendment would have defined a church as cooperating with the SBC provided that it “[a]confirms, appoints, or employs only men as pastors or elders of any kind, as directed by the Holy Scriptures.”

To change its bylaws, the convention must first approve any proposed change at an annual meeting after which confirm it with a final vote at the next annual meeting. That vote requires a two-thirds majority for the change to turn out to be a part of the bylaws. The women pastors amendment was set to pass in 2023, but failed this 12 months since it received only 61% of the vote.

Some of those against the change argued that the assembly had already spoken on the problem, had mechanisms in place to deal with churches with women pastors, and subsequently didn’t need to alter its structure. Nothing on this argument suggests support for girls, and in reality, opponents of the change often reiterated their support for the denomination's stance against women pastors.

For many Southern Baptists, the exclusion of ladies from the position of senior pastors isn’t an obstacle to their participation in other pastoral roles who wouldn’t have the supervisory authority of the senior pastor or require ordination. That was definitely the language of the initiators of the 1984 resolution, and the try and exclude churches where women hold pastoral roles apart from senior pastor, as they recently did in Alexandria, Virginia, goes beyond the intent of the sooner resolution.

Southern Baptists also place great importance on what they call “the autonomy of the local church.” This deeply held Baptist belief implies that each local church is self-governing and isn’t controlled in any way by the SBC. By increasingly excluding women from pastoral roles, the SBC could have been perceived as encroaching on the autonomy of the local church.

In 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention refused to readmit Saddleback Church to its ranks after it was expelled from the church earlier that 12 months for appointing female ministers. What do you think that this vote will change?

I don't think the vote will change anything. Saddleback's pastors weren’t senior pastorsthey were ordained, and the church affirmed the flexibility of ladies to assume any pastoral role. We can see from this 12 months's expulsion of First Baptist Alexandria that the SBC will proceed to purge churches that endorse women in any pastoral roles.

The only thing this 12 months's vote has shown us is that a major minority of “Messengers” – as Southern Baptists call the delegates to the SBC's annual convention – don’t want to interfere within the structure of the convention.

At the identical time, the SBC has voted against in vitro fertilization. Could you explain this vote and the SBC's historical views on the personification of the fetus?

This resolution expands Southern Baptists' opposition to any procedure that kills fetuses or embryos. The resolution sympathizes with infertile couples but argues that the method is ultimately the “destruction of embryonic human life” because embryos are sometimes stored and destroyed after successful implantation.

In the Seventies, before the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC within the Eighties and early Nineties, generally against abortion on demandbut additionally they anxious about government interference in women's decision-making about their very own bodies.

In the Eighties, the Convention made a pointy turn to the fitting with the aim of Abortion banned again. The language of the SBC modified from “fetal life” to “preborn” or “unborn” individuals. Now we see the SBC speaking of embryos as fully-fledged people and calls for “the government to prevent actions that are incompatible with the dignity and worth of every human being, and this necessarily includes frozen human embryos.”

What else was necessary about this meeting?

Despite the pressure that has been placed on the SBC in recent times to do something about its Problem of sexual abusehas the Convention repeatedly failed to make significant progress, especially on the long-awaited database to trace perpetrators. This 12 months, too, the Messengers voted to pass several abuse reforms, but survivors were disillusioned how little change actually takes place. Significant changes all the time appear to fail as a consequence of concerns about insurance and liability.

Taken together, the vote against the constitutional amendment, the resolution against artificial insemination, and the inaction on sexual abuse reform underscore that the religion community's ultra-conservative views on women remain unchanged.

TikTok, the short video company with Chinese roots, did essentially the most American thing possible on May 7, 2024: It sued the US government, within the person of Attorney General Merrick Garland, in federal court. The lawsuit asserts federal law that went into effect on April 24, 2024. Ban TikTok unless it sells itself violates the US Constitution.

The law names TikTok and its parent company ByteDance Ltd. expressly. This also applies to other applications and web sites that reach greater than one million monthly users, enable the exchange of knowledge and whose shares come from China, Russia, Iran or North Korea to twenty% or more. If the president determines that such applications or web sites “pose a significant threat to national security,” those apps and web sites must also either be sold or banned from the United States

TikTok's lawsuit says the law violates the First Amendment since it fails to offer evidence of the national security threat posed by the app and doesn’t seek a less restrictive treatment. Despite Opposite claims by the legislatureThe law forcing TikTok’s divestiture — the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — implicates First Amendment interests. In our view, this is finished in a way that goes beyond this particular case.

As an organization registered within the United States TikTok, which provides a web-based publishing platform, has the First Amendment right to decide on which messages—on this case, user videos—to publish.

A ban seems to us, scholars who Study law and technologyan enormous one Preliminary restrictionwhich is mostly prohibited by U.S. courts. A previous restraint is a government motion to forestall speech, typically some type of publication, before it occurs.

Speech within the crosshairs

Proponents of the law claim that that is the case no ban – all TikTok has to do is sell itself. These supporters describe the bill as a divestment, a purely economic settlement that they are saying is meant to guard TikTok from First Amendment challenges. After the sale, users would have the option to happily proceed using TikTok without caring who owns the corporate. But the law strikes us as an attempt to regulate freedom of expression by mandating a change of ownership.

Changing the language content of the app is the express goal of some supporters of the law. The essential creator of the law, former U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher, who resigned from office in April to Join a enterprise capital firm backed partially by Microsoft, told the New York Times that he was primarily concerned concerning the Potential for the Chinese Communist Party to spread propaganda within the app. The times And The Wall Street Journal have reported that Congress passed this law partially because unfounded accusations that TikTok is unfairly promoting a side within the Israel-Hamas war.

Imagine if the federal government told Jeff Bezos that he needed to sell the Washington Post since it feared that his control of the newspaper would help him advance a selected agenda. Or to make use of a digital analogy: What if the federal government told Elon Musk that he needed to sell X, formerly Twitter, because he didn't like the best way he moderated the content of legal statements? These scenarios clearly relate to the protections of the First Amendment.

Property is very important

The transfer of TikTok's ownership from one company to a different could be very significant for purposes of the First Amendment evaluation.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan noted this during oral arguments in a case unrelated to TikTok's ownership Ownership could make a difference in a single app. She noted that the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk modified the character of the app. Kagan said: “Twitter users woke up one day and realized they were ”

In fact, the Washington Post found one Tilt to the correct after Twitter modified hands.

By forcing the sale of TikTok to an organization with no ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Congress intends the law to vary the character of the platform. These sorts of government actions implicate the core concerns that the First Amendment was intended to guard against: government interference in private party speech.

U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, pointed to a different instance where the US government ordered a Chinese company to sell a US app. In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States asked Grindr's latest Chinese owners to sell the dating app, which the Chinese owners did the next 12 months. In this case, the foreign owners couldn’t implement their First Amendment rights within the United States because they were outside the United States, and due to this fact no court addressed the problem.

National security claims

The government has not communicated to the general public the national security concerns identified within the TikTok law. While such concerns, if true, could justify intervention, some Americans are prone to refuse to just accept claims of national security urgency in good faith. To counteract skepticism about secret government power, particularly with regards to speech rights, the federal government may have to elucidate its claims.

U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, who each supported the TikTok law and have seen the federal government's secret evidence, requested the discharge of this information. We consider it is a critical step for the general public to properly examine the federal government's claim that a ban is warranted on this case. In any case, courts will ultimately weigh the classified evidence to find out whether the federal government's national security concerns justified this intrusion into the speech.

Without a judicial invalidation or statutory repeal of the law, a world is prone to emerge by which TikTok will not have the option to operate effectively within the United States in a 12 months as a result of the lack of mobile app stores to release updates to the software and Oracle Corp. unable to proceed hosting the app and its US user data on their servers. TikTok could go offline within the United States on January 19, 2025.

Most Americans don't prefer it pay or pay their income taxes. But yearly, about 85% of them will voluntarily pay the complete amount of taxes he owes.

Nevertheless, the IRS believes so loses over $400 billion in revenue yearly because people don't file their taxes, under-report their income, or underpay the quantity of tax they owe.

Most of those losses are the results of deliberate tax evasion schemes aimed toward lining the own pockets of unscrupulous taxpayers. However, some people take a less greedy and more principled view: they refuse to file tax returns or pay all their taxes for moral or ethical reasons. Essentially, they view the choice to not pay income taxes as a type of civil disobedience.

Although the federal government has not released much data on these individuals, it estimated that within the late Nineteen Nineties 47,000 of them had debts of about $540 million in federal income taxes.

As a tax professor and Scholar of judgment and decision makingI categorize individuals who don’t pay taxes for moral or ethical reasons into one among two groups that I call “tax deniers” and “tax protestors.” Although their motivations could also be different, the federal government and courts are inclined to reply to them similarly unfavorably.

Tax dodgers

The first group includes individuals who deny that the state has the correct to gather income taxes. These so-called Tax evaders are legally and morally against filing tax returns and paying taxes due to false belief that taxes are unconstitutional or otherwise invalid.

Tax evaders present quite a few arguments None of this was accepted from courts or the IRS. For example, some tax evaders consider that the sixteenth Amendment The Constitution, which provides Congress the ability to levy income taxes, was never properly ratified. They note that the text of the amendment, which was ratified in 1909, differed from the text originally proposed by Congress since it contained the next: Differences in spelling, capitalization and punctuation.

Others argue that federal income taxes are illegal because they violate the law Fifth Amendmentwhat the federal government forbids Taking private property without due process The Law.

Tax evaders use quite a lot of methods to avoid taxes. Some simply refuse to file a tax return, while others accept it complicated systems using offshore trusts Hide income from the federal government.

Tax protesters

Unlike tax deniers, tax protesters don’t deny the federal government's right to lift taxes. Rather, they refuse to pay some or all of their taxes to protest government-funded policies and programs which can be inconsistent with their ethical and moral beliefs.

Common examples of presidency spending they object to This includes military spending and medical research.

Tax dodgers have existed because the American Revolution Quakers refused to pay taxes to the colonial governments for military purposes. In the Sixties, public figures like Joan Baez and Gloria Steinem withheld paying their federal income taxes protesting the federal government's involvement within the Vietnam War.

Many tax filers file accurate tax returns but refuse to pay some or the entire tax owed. For example, some war tax advocates determine the share of income tax revenue goes towards military spending after which withhold that percentage of their tax while they pay the remainder. Groups just like the War Resisters League provide protesters with information to assist them resolve how much to withhold. The group expects this to occur in 2025 45% of presidency spending goes to the military and suggests that folks withhold that portion of the whole tax they owe.

In some cases, protesters are redirecting taxes they don't pay to 1 or more charities. Other tax opponents take an approach that’s more inside the law, consciously earn as little as possible in order that their income falls below the extent required to file a tax return.

The government's response

Not surprisingly, the IRS disagrees with the arguments of each kinds of objectors. The agency has repeatedly stated that a The taxpayer has no right to refuse Paying taxes based on religious or moral beliefs.

The IRS also warns taxpayers who engage in the sort of civil disobedience should expect to pay a price – including fines, penalties, interest and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS also has the authority to do that seize a taxpayer's wages and other assets to settle any unpaid tax debts.

Tax deniers and tax opponents did the identical as all residents the correct to appeal any actions the IRS takes against them. But way back to the nineteenth century, courts have consistently ruled in favor of the federal government, holding that tax liability doesn’t rely on a taxpayer's compliance with government programs or policies.

For example, within the 1860s, a Massachusetts suffragette refused to pay property taxes unless women got the correct to vote. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ordered her to pay, and when she continued to refuse, authorities turned on her confiscated and sold their property to cover the unpaid taxes.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government was mortgaged the property of celebrities who refused to pay taxes that were speculated to be used to finance the war.

More recently, actor Wesley Snipes was taken to court in 2008 after arguing that he had no obligation to pay income taxes and saying the federal government was illegally collecting taxes from its residents. Snipes was convicted of a misdemeanor count of willful failure to file federal income tax returns sentenced to a few years in prison. After an unsuccessful appeal, he served 28 months.

Objecting to income tax shouldn’t be in itself against the law. But not actually paying it’s one other matter. This puts people liable to paying fines, having their wages garnished and serving prison time.