The Sixteenth Amendment was never properly ratified

The claim

Bill Benson’s The Law That Never Was (1985) catalogs alleged irregularities in the state ratifications of the Sixteenth Amendment — typographical errors, missing capitalizations, varying punctuation, and procedural defects in some state legislative actions. Benson concludes that the Amendment was never properly ratified and is therefore void, rendering the federal income tax unconstitutional.

What the research actually shows

Benson’s documentary research is partially accurate as a matter of historical record. The state ratification documents do contain transcription differences from the version certified by Secretary of State Knox in 1913. Some states' journals show procedural anomalies. None of these are fabrications.

What Benson does not establish is the legal conclusion. The “enrolled bill” doctrine — articulated in Field v. Clark, 143 U.S. 649 (1892), and applied consistently since — holds that the certified version of a duly enrolled federal enactment is conclusive on the courts. Once the Secretary of State certified the Amendment as ratified by the requisite number of states, the certification is not subject to collateral attack.

The judicial response

Every federal court that has considered the Benson claim has rejected it. United States v. Thomas, 788 F.2d 1250 (7th Cir. 1986), is the canonical opinion. Easterbrook, writing for the Seventh Circuit, treated the Benson research as foreclosed by Field v. Clark and imposed sanctions on the litigant for raising it. Benson himself was later enjoined from selling his “reliance defense” packets to taxpayers.

Verdict

Foreclosed. The argument has been definitively rejected by every court that has heard it, and raising it in litigation produces sanctions, not engagement. Whether the underlying historical research has any independent academic value is a separate question; as a legal claim, it is closed.

• sixteenth-amendment
• ratification
• benson