A.L.E.R.T.
(America Law Education Rights & Taxation)
03-09-2002
Supremes Revise
Article 1, Section 1
Nary a week goes by that INFORM AMERICA! doesn't receive a request from some lawyer, C.P.A., financial planner (or other licensed mind) for "court cases proving that your position on income taxes is true".
At first, we would patiently send back ponderous, scholarly answers, replete with weighty, documented expositions of the law, explaining that "we don't have a 'position' on taxes"; that we just read the law and see what it says (can you imagine?).
We would explain why the courts cannot legislate from the bench; why all law in a constitutionally limited republic such as ours can only be a written law, and; why if the law were not readily comprehensible to even, well, Dubya, it would have to be held "void for vagueness", etc., ad nauseam, blah blah, and so forth.
None of which was probably read. After all, had they read the Constitution, Madison's Notes on the Federal Convention, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, Elliott's Debates, and the Internal Revenue Code and tax regulations in the first place, they wouldn't have been asking us "what the courts have to say".
Now, as you might imagine, in spite of our magnanimous good nature and cheerfully unflagging commitment to the cause of Liberty, it can get pretty "old" having to constantly provide the equivalent of free remedial reading services to the cognitively dissonant.
So we decided to take a different tack, one which we have found to be far more effective. Now, after we have urged licensed professionals and others to "Please watch our video", "Please read our book, for FREE!", "Please go read the law for yourself", "Please do your own research", and they STILL come back with "Yeah, but what do the courts say?", we simply send them the following. Plant tongue firmly in cheek.
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INFORM AMERICA! NEWS WIRE
Westminster, Maryland
### FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ###
SUPREME COURT SAYS JAMES MADISON ALL WET, REVISES CONSTITUTION AMIDST CONSERVATIVE CONSTERNATION
In a bold and unprecedented move that has yet to rock the Republic, the Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous 9-0 decision earlier today that Article 1, Section 1 of the United States Constitution has been in error all these years due to the illegibly sloppy handwriting of James Madison.
The diminutive and bookish Madison, known as the "Father of the Constitution", took copious, day-to-day notes of the floor debates at the 1787 convention of the states in Philadelphia during which the Constitution was hammered, word-by-word on the anvil of reason, into a clear and unequivocal blueprint for liberty that could NEVER be twisted, NEVER be interpreted, NEVER be misunderstood, under ANY circumstances, EVER, by anyone, no how, no way.
Until, that is, an impromptu press interview hastily arranged this morning during which token minority jurist, Clarence Thomas, delivered the following explanation to befuddled reporters (who had previously thought of the Constitution only as a tourist attraction moored in Boston harbor), stating:
"Mr. Madison's erroneous transcription of Article 1, Section 1 and many other sections of the Constitution was no doubt due to a severe tremens that we can only surmise was brought on by a chronic drinking problem, one which we can only speculate may have resulted from his unremitting guilt over the slavery issue."
Republicans everywhere were caught off guard by the seismic revelation. In praising the high court's "laudable and progressive" move, leading Democrat, Charles Schumer, commented dryly, "This will threaten the global warming of martinis everywhere."
For those who were not taught the Constitution in the government schools (where history is now optional), Article 1, Section 1 reads:
"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."
Since "All" usually means "all" (unless defined by Bill Clinton), court watchers have been pretty much certain up until now that what the Founding Fathers really meant to say was, well, "all". How much more wrong could they have been?
Career socialist, Justice David Souter, added, "Artificial intelligence character recognition software recently developed by the Internal Revenue Service has just deciphered what "Madison's Notes' REALLY say. It will be far easier henceforth for the Court to simply REVISE the rest of the Constitution than to go through the painstaking process of having to AMEND it.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose political views could best be described as slightly to the left of Lenin's, clarified that Article 1, Section 1 should now read:
'Some uncertain and varying degree of law making power shall be vested in a Congress which shall consist of a House of Representatives and a Senate, ultimately to be decided for all posterity by divining the meaning of judicial sophistry contained within officious utterances made by privileged, black-robed members of the private, closed shop, monopoly labor union known as the American Bar Association, upon their virtually irrevocable lifetime appointment to the bench, through the political cronyism process'."
At a cocktail celebration held after the news conference, the Justices assured all present that the Department of Education had already been notified of the groundbreaking ruling, and would soon take measures to ensure that government school books everywhere would be revised "to provide all school age children in this free land of ours, regardless of race, color or economic background, the equal opportunity to learn the true intent of the Founders, as painful a part of our national heritage as that intent may prove to be."