Only residents of the District of Columbia are subject to federal income tax

The claim

Paul Andrew Mitchell’s The Federal Zone and related sovereign-citizen sources argue that federal legislative jurisdiction is limited to the District of Columbia, federal territories, and federal enclaves. State citizens, on this view, are not within federal “United States” jurisdiction for tax purposes and are therefore not subject to the income tax.

The authority

The Sixteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to tax incomes “from whatever source derived.” The income tax statutes in subtitle A apply, by their terms, to “every individual” who is a citizen or resident of the United States. The “United States” in this context means the entire country, not the federal enclave sense in which it is sometimes used in property law. Brushaber v. Union Pacific, 240 U.S. 1 (1916), confirmed federal authority to tax the income of state citizens and residents.

The argument relies on conflating two distinct usages of “United States” — the geographic entirety of the country (the relevant usage for taxation) and the narrower federal-enclave sense (relevant in some property and admiralty contexts).

Verdict

Foreclosed. Every federal court that has addressed the Federal Zone argument has rejected it. Litigants who raise it face §6673 sanctions. The legal question is closed; the broader sovereign-citizen movement that propagates the argument is a continuing source of harm to the people who act on it.

• jurisdiction
• federal-zone
• sovereignty
• state-citizenship