"It's so simple, it's ridiculous": taxing times for 16th amendment rebels.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

"I WON'T GO TO JAIL."

Bob Schulz announces this in late January to a rapt crowd of 200 gathered in an auditorium in Crystal City, Virginia. It's the first national conference of the We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, a nonprofit advocacy group Schulz founded and runs.

He delivers his declaration not with reckless bravado but with a dignified, quiet, middle-management-lifer assurance, in keeping with his general mien. Schulz is a serious white male in a nice conservative dark suit, a former environmental engineer for both General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency.

He's been married for 38 years to the same woman, and he has four children of whom he is quite proud. Yet when his kids begged him to reconsider the path that requires him to declare publicly that he won't go to jail, his wife Judy told them, "Your father put his country before his family, and I support him."

Schulz has stopped paying federal income tax, and he isn't afraid to let anyone, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), know it. Not only is he not paying, but he's also leading a national movement telling everyone else they shouldn't pay either.

When I talk to him after the conference, he doesn't seem quite so confident he won't go to jail. But he doesn't seem to care one way or the other. "Clearly [the government is] going to react," he says. "They may well sooner or later come at me in one way or another. You hear people say, 'Bob, they're going to take you out. Dozens of armed agents will come turn your life upside down.' You hear all these things. I have to say I have no fears. I fear God and God alone."

Americans have been protesting and avoiding taxes since before the U.S. officially existed. We are a nation born of tax protests. This tradition feeds the attitude that unites the serious, almost obsessed crowd here: the belief that they are the true patriots, staunch constitutionalists fiercely dedicated to the ideals that make America great. A radical transvaluation of values is going on right here in Crystal City. Far from being the very foundation of solid citizenry, acceding to the federal personal income tax is, among this crowd, an act of treason against what defines America: its Constitution and its "true laws."

Schulz's We The People Foundation is transforming the often subterranean struggle to deny the legitimacy of the income tax. For decades this movement has been an inchoate collection of small congregations following varied gurus. Schulz and his crew, by contrast, offer a unified church with a canon of Right Arguments. The anti-income tax movement now has, through Schulz, a united, highly activist national membership organization claiming around 5,000 dues-paying members, a mailing list of 64,000, and local coordinators in 39 states and 600 counties.

While in the past evangelists of the "income tax is a fraud" message have tended to sell books and seminars, the We The People Foundation has the advantage of being hard to blithely condemn as a scam. It is not a business selling advice but a nonprofit dedicated to spending money--more than $1 million since taking up this fight--to spread the word. Its founder claims Gandhi as his influence: From him Schulz learned that to fight an unjust tyranny, you need a proactive, nonviolent mass movement, and that is what he is trying to create.

The movement against the income tax has lately adopted one of the tropes that define an on-the-rise minority in modern America: Its members want to be called what they call themselves--the "tax honesty" movement--and not be slapped with the pejoratives that most people have known them by (if aware of them at all).

At the politest, their nemesis the ms calls them "tax protesters." (Less politely, they've been known as "income tax cranks.") A woman who runs a small business making and selling display boards in Massachusetts, who claims to have not paid personal income tax for a few years now with no practical repercussions, tells me that "when people say 'tax protester movement,' it drives me nuts. I do not protest taxes. I think they are absolutely necessary. I protest illegal confiscation of assets, which is what the income tax is" She has no problem, she assures me, with sales taxes, property taxes, or corporate taxes.

The partisans of the tax honesty movement go beyond complaining that the income tax is too high, or that out-of-control IRS agents enforce it in thuggish ways. They claim, for a dizzyingly complicated variety of reasons, that there is no legal obligation to pay it. The continued life--and even flourishing--of that notion, in the face of obloquy, fines, and jail sentences, says something fascinating about a peculiarly American spirit of defiance. It may even say something encouraging about what it means to live in a nation of laws, not of men.

"I Used to Be Normal, But ..."

Bob Schulz has a long history of fighting the government in the name of constitutionally limited powers and proper procedure. His battles date back to 1979, when he successfully sued to halt a new sewage treatment system near Lake George in New York. (According to Schulz, the proposal ignored environmental impact requirements.) Since then he's been involved in more than 100 such lawsuits and won many.

All that is small beer compared to his latest crusade. Since 1999 Schulz has presented his contentions regarding the income tax's illegality to the IRS, the president, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and every member of Congress. He has humbly beseeched them to answer a list of questions regarding whether he, or any American citizen, has an actual constitutional, statutory, legal obligation to pay the federal income tax.

He's led marches around IRS headquarters in D.C., and he went on a brief hunger strike in 2001. In July of that year his persistence prompted representatives of the IRS and DOJ to promise to show up at a public meeting Schulz was organizing. They promised to lay forth their official arguments as to why we do indeed have a legal obligation to pay income tax. That meeting was scheduled for September 25-26, 2001. The 9/11 attacks made Schulz reschedule, and the reds bowed out of appearing at the rescheduled event. Schulz feels he has pursued every proper step to find an answer to his questions. Now, he says, it's time to fight.

When The New York Times asked IRS spokesman Terry Lemons why the Schulz petition was being ignored, Lemons "said that courts had upheld the validity of the tax laws and that the agency did not want to waste time and resources dealing with well-settled issues. Mr. Lemons added that the recent spate of enforcement actions taken by the IRS against promoters of abusive tax schemes ... show other ways that government is answering the petition."

Not the answer the movement wants, obviously. But it's one they should have expected. Never has any court anywhere--much less the IRS--accepted as valid any of the many arguments the movement offers for how and why there is no legal obligation for individuals to pay federal income tax. In fact, courts will fine you up to $25,000 for even raising them, insisting such arguments have been rejected so often by so many courts at so many levels that they are patently frivolous and time-wasting.

Despite this, the dominant vibe at this conference, even among those whose pursuit of these curious doctrines has led them to conflicts with government or employers, is hopeful in a religious sense. They clasp valiantly to belief in their own righteousness and the certainty that through that righteousness they one day will be delivered.

I eavesdrop on one smiling lady with a shock of short white hair telling a fellow attendee of her long fight over garnishment of her wages from a tax lien. It sounds like plenty of trouble came her way, and in the end the courts were taking her money anyway. But she was...